Oregon Quarterly Summer 2016 by UO/Oregon Quarterly

Oregon

SUSTAINABLE CITIES | TRIBES AND CLIMATE CHANGE | AFTER A SHOOTING

Q U A R T E R LY

SUMMER 2016

HOW DUCKS REINVENTED SNEAKERS

THE

MAGAZINE

THE

UNIVERSITY

OREGON

Cheer in Style.

This striking “O” is hand made at Skeie’s Jewelers in Eugene Oregon, the home of the Ducks! Please Call for price and availability. 10 Oakway Center Eugene, OR 97401 541-345-0354 www.skeies.com

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EDITOR’S NOTE

dialogue

Best Laid Plans T H E M AG A Z I N E O F T H E U N I V E R S IT Y O F O R E G O N S U M M E R 2 01 6 • VO LU M E 9 5 N U M B E R 4

PUBLISHER George Evano

gevano@uoregon.edu | 541-346-2379 EDITOR Jonathan Graham

jgraham@uoregon.edu | 541-346-5047 SENIOR WRITER AND EDITOR Rosemary Camozzi

rcamozzi@uoregon.edu | 541-346-3606 ART DIRECTOR JoDee Stringham

jodees@uoregon.edu | 541-346-1593

ADVERTISING DIRECTOR Susi Thelen PUBLISHING ADMINISTRATOR Shelly Cooper

scooper@uoregon.edu | 541-346-5045

STAFF PHOTOGRAPHERS Charlie Litchfield,

Dustin Whiteaker

PROOFREADERS Sharleen Nelson, Scott Skelton INTERNS Chloe Huckins, Gina M. Mills EDITORIAL ADVISORY BOARD

Mark Blaine, Betsy Boyd, Kathi O’Neil Dordevic, Kathleen Holt, Alexandra Lyons, Kenneth O’Connell, Holly Simons, Mike Thoele WEBSITE OregonQuarterly.com MAILING ADDRESS

5228 University of Oregon Eugene, Oregon 97403-5228 Phone 541-346-5045 EDITORIAL 541-346-5047 ADVERTISING SALES Ross Johnson, Oregon Media

ross@oregon-media.com | 541-948-5200 E-MAIL quarterly@uoregon.edu

OREGON QUARTERLY is published by the UO in February,

May, August, and November and distributed free to alumni. Printed in the USA on recycled paper. © 2016 University of Oregon. All rights reserved. Views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of the UO administration. CHANGE OF ADDRESS

Alumni Records, 1204 University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon 97403-1204 541-302-0336, alumrec@uoregon.edu ADMINISTRATION

President Michael H. Schill, Senior Vice President and Provost Scott Coltrane, Vice President for University Advancement Michael Andreasen, Vice President for University Communications Kyle Henley, Vice President for Enrollment Management Roger Thompson, Vice President for Finance and Administration Jamie Moffitt, Vice President for Institutional Equity and Inclusion Yvette Marie Alex-Assensoh, Vice President for Student Life Robin Holmes, Interim Vice President for Research Brad Shelton, Associate Vice President for Advancement and Executive Director of the UO Alumni Association Kelly Menachemson UO INFORMATION 541-346-1000

The University of Oregon is an equal-opportunity, affirmative-action institution committed to cultural diversity and compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. This publication will be made available in accessible formats upon request: 541-346-5048.

Readers often ask where we get the ideas for Oregon Quarterly stories. There’s not a single, simple answer. Some result from a carefully calibrated process. Others are happy accidents. Every once in a while, one arrives, almost as if gift-wrapped. In this issue, we have examples of each of these varieties. And maybe even one that combines aspects of all three. Mary DeMocker’s feature, “Hub for Change” (page 44), has a long history. I heard about the UO’s Sustainable Cities Initiative before I started working here. A colleague at my previous institution spoke of it the way a serious football fan might have rhapsodized about Oregon’s blur offense during the Marcus Mariota years. So when Mary pitched us on the topic more than a year ago, I was already onboard. When we began planning the story in earnest, we were able to develop a rich online version that pairs the OQ story with a video by Dustin Whitaker, one of our staff videographers. (Oh, and when we started thinking about this topic way back when, we didn’t have staff videographers. So I guess that was part of the calibration, too.) While going through a folder of query letters (most old enough that they were addressed to editors who no longer work on OQ), I came across a pitch from a writer my colleagues and I didn’t know who wanted to write a feature about a program we hadn’t heard of. The writer is Nathan Gilles and his story, “A World Aflame,” is about how climate change affects Native American tribes in the Northwest (page 32). This article is an example of two great gifts that this university provides OQ: plenty of nooks and crannies where little-known stories reside, and generations of talented writers trained in our own journalism school. Our third feature, the one featured on the cover, was like a welcome gift that I received when I stepped into the editor’s role. My predecessor, Ann Wiens, mentioned this story idea to me on my first day of work as her managing editor. She even had a writer in mind. Ryan Jones’ story, “The Great Sneaker Revolution” (page 38) explores how innovative, UO-trained designers created a series of shoes that tapped into the Zeitgeist in ways that transcend the confines of the basketball court or field of play. This story started as Ann’s baby, but it’s been a pleasure and honor to nurture it. And then there’s our essay contest winner, “At School, A Shooting,” by Drew Terhune of Eugene (page 25). The Northwest Perspectives Essay Contest is an OQ tradition, started by former editors Guy Maynard and Kathleen Holt, and now in its 16th year. This year there were 358 entries—five times what we typically receive. The teetering stack included an incredible variety of stories of the region, and it was humbling and moving to select winners from such a collection. The entries were judged blind, with our staff choosing a dozen or so finalists, and then guest judge Karen Russell, author of Swamplandia!, selecting the winners.

***

With this issue, we say goodbye to a couple of key players on the OQ team. Susi Thelen has been OQ’s advertising director for 24 years. She’s moved on to a new role in enrollment management. We will miss her energy, good humor, and dedication—to say nothing of the fact that she was a rare extrovert among us quiet artists and writer types. Our editorial intern, Chloe Huckins, is graduating at the end of the term. Chloe has been instrumental to the magazine, particularly online, for the past couple of years. She also makes every meeting she attends decidedly less boring.

Happy reading and keep in touch,

Jonathan Graham Editor

T H E M AG A Z I N E O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F O R E G O N

contents DEPARTMENTS

DIALOGUE 1 1 Editor’s Note 4

Letters

From the President

INTRO 9 10 Campus News 12 Online Safety and the New Ethics of Privacy 14 Brainstorm

We have to find the equivalent 12 of closing your curtains in the digital world.

18 Reimagining Early Music 21 The Influencer 23 Ducks on the Run 25 At School, A Shooting 28 Major Keys 30 Profile: Brendan Bohannan 31 Bookmarks

—CARRIE LEONETTI, UO SCHOOL OF LAW

ON THE COVER The Air Jordan III—designed by Tinker Hatfield, BArch ’77—was the first shoe to feature the now iconic “Jumpman” logo and the first to include visible Nike Air. In retrospect, the shoe signaled the beginning of a new era in which the company’s brand was linked to the names and likenesses of individual athletes. Our cover design was inspired by marketing materials created for The Rise of Sneaker Culture, a 2015 show at the Brooklyn Museum.

OLD OREGON 49 50 Power of Attorney 52 The Picture of Health 54 Class Notes 64 Duck Tale

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DETAIL OF ILLUSTRATION BY ISABEL ESPANOL, PHOTOGRAPH BY STEVE SMITH

The Magazine of the University of Oregon Summer 2016 Vol. 95 No. 4

OQ ONLINE OregonQuarterly.com WEBSITE EXCLUSIVE See a video about the Sustainable City Year Program efforts in Redmond at OregonQuarterly.com. TALK TO US Comment on stories and share your favorites at OregonQuarterly.com. Email us at quarterly@ uoregon.edu. FEATURES

A WORLD AFLAME

Researchers from the UO’s Environmental Studies Program are teaming up with experts from the US Forest Service to explore the effects of climate change on Northwest tribes. BY NATHAN GILLES, MS ’11

THE GREAT SNEAKER REVOLUTION

Innovations by UO-trained designers helped make basketball shoes a cultural touchstone. BY RYAN JONES

HUB OF CHANGE

The Sustainable Cities Initiative is helping cities become greener and more livable—in Oregon, across the country, and internationally.

MORE TO LOVE See additional materials— including video—related to stories in the print edition, and read stories not found in the pages of this publication. LEARN MORE For more stories about the university, and to explore the research, discovery and innovation happening on campus, visit around.uoregon.edu. JOIN IN Submit letters, class notes, and photos for our “Ducks Afield” section at OregonQuarterly.com.

BY MARY DEMOCKER, BA ’92 PHOTOGRAPH BY ZUREKS (CC BY-SA 3.0)

T H E M AG A Z I N E O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F O R E G O N

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LETTERS

Please, Mr. Postman

or the last few issues, the team here at OQ has noticed a decline in the number of letters to the editor we are receiving. This makes us scratch our heads a little and wonder why. We realize that in 2016 there are quicker ways to comment and respond to content than to fill up the fountain pen and pull out the fine stationery. But still. We are not getting tons of feedback, and we really do love to hear from readers. If you’ve been working at magazines as long as we have, you expect some article to cause controversy or raise someone’s hackles. So the calm periods are usually followed by a storm. It’s like when the tide goes out, and you’re waiting for its inevitable return. But our tide’s been out for a while. And we miss it. Whatever you think of this or any other issue of OQ, and no matter what’s on your mind, we truly do want to hear from you. Comment on stories at OregonQuarterly.com, e-mail us at quarterly@uoregon.edu, post

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on our Facebook page at facebook.com/ OregonQuarterly, or use that last forever stamp and write to us at 5228 University of Oregon, Eugene, Oregon 97403-5228. We do try to print as many letters as possible. We often hear from JOE FISCHER, BA ’60, MFA ’63 (Longview, Washington), an artist who sends us handwritten class notes about his latest commissions in envelopes decorated with colorful images of the Duck, like the one that illustrates this page. Joe even sent Jonathan a painting to congratulate him on his new role as editor. (The painting, which is lovely, depicts Cape Disappointment, but Jonathan is choosing not to take that as a commentary on his prospects for success.) We also heard from CRAIG WECKESSER, BA ’64 (Rochester, Washington), but his letter was so nice, you’ll probably think we made it up. He writes, “I’ve been a little ill the past few days, thus this belated message to you all. Congratulations and Wow on a wonderful Spring OQ issue. I think the OQ made me well.” Craig goes on to compliment the members of our team and many of our contributors on their work on the last issue. We’re not sure we

believe in the healing powers of this magazine, but next time you’re feeling under the weather, take two aspirin, and read OQ in the morning. Perhaps the most striking letter we received was not in response to any content in the magazine, but was in response to the letter we sent to the 348 entrants who were not selected as finalists in the Northwest Perspectives Essay Contest. ANNE GUERIN of Langlois, Oregon, wrote: “Rejection letters are not any fun, but the graciousness of thought and tone in your letter eased the sting. I especially appreciated ‘please keep writing’ and intend to do so as a member of a memoir writing group of remarkable women with remarkable stories to tell.” We do hope Anne and her friends keep writing. And you, too. Essays. Sestinas. Manifestos. Clever tweets. And once in while, maybe a note to us?

We want to hear from you.

Submit your letters at OregonQuarterly.com, to quarterly@uoregon.edu, or by mail to Editor, Oregon Quarterly, 5228 University of Oregon, Eugene, OR 97403-5228. You may also post comments online at OregonQuarterly.com. Published letters may be edited for brevity, clarity, and style.

Same Duck. New Pond.

STEP ONE: Download the Be a Duck app. Then look for the “Oregon Campus Tour” guide. (Yes, this is technically two steps.) STEP TWO: Get yourself to campus. We know you know the way. STEP THREE: Take a self-guided audio tour. Because there’s always something new at the UO. New trees, for example. Oh, and new multimillion-dollar, state-of-the-art research facilities, too. VISIT.UOREGON.EDU

Student Orientation Programs is part of our Office of Enrollment Management, which guides Ducks through the processes of admissions, registration, matriculation, and financial aid. Learn more at enrollment.uoregon.edu.

dialogue

FROM THE PRESIDENT

President Michael H. Schill, shown here at an event about the UO’s Sustainable Cities Initiative, believes the drive for excellence can touch all parts of the university.

Success On and Off the Field

s I reflect on my first year as president, I have learned much about what makes the University of Oregon an incredible place to learn, discover, teach, and serve. I remain impressed, as I expected to be, with the quality of our faculty, the dedication of our staff, the caliber of our students, and the loyalty of our alumni and supporters. What I did not expect was that I would come to thoroughly enjoy and appreciate the one part of my job I knew the least about—athletics. As a law school dean and professor, I have had very little experience with sports during my career. Those who know me, or who have taken a good look at me, would be the first to tell you I’m not particularly athletically inclined. Indeed, when it was first announced that the Board of Trustees had appointed me president of the UO, my friends at the University of Chicago (a school not known for athletic achievement) quickly intervened with lessons on the strategies of defensive and offensive lines and the difference between a pick-and-roll and a jump shot. I also learned quickly that the UO dominated the PAC 12 in many sports, that people recognized the

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“O” everywhere, and that spending on athletics was a source of tension on campus. Almost one year later, I can say with enormous pride that I am a Ducks fan, and I can follow most of the action on the field, court, or track. I also truly understand and believe in the value of athletics at the University of Oregon. As you walk campus, look at our history, talk to our alumni and students, or read the story in this edition of Oregon Quarterly about the UO’s connections to the development of athletics footwear, it is clear that sports are an important part of our history, heritage, and identity. I am proud of the vital role athletics plays in bringing prospective students to our doorstep, promoting campus pride, and keeping alumni connected and engaged. I am also proud that our athletics department is one of the few in the nation that is self-supporting—taking no university general funds, generating enough revenue for all 21 sports teams, and providing more than $11 million a year for academics by covering tuition for all student athletes, including nonresidents. The UO’s student athletes and coaches have fostered a culture of excellence that is envied across the nation. But the UO’s academic

reputation has not achieved the same level of acclaim. That is not because we do not have an incredible faculty or amazing programs—we do. This year, chemistry professor Geri Richmond received the National Medal of Science, the highest honor our country can bestow on a scientist. We have world-class faculty members in a wide variety of disciplines—from the arts and humanities to the natural sciences, from the social sciences to business. However, our academic and research reputation has not matched that of athletics because we have not, as an institution, nourished and cultivated it in the same focused and strategic way. We are changing that. With 40 academic searches underway, we are bolstering research productivity and increasing tenure-track faculty ranks. In my first year, we have boosted funding for PhD students, increased scholarships, added advising support, and improved student learning spaces and opportunities. By realigning resources, advocating for public investments, and increasing philanthropy, we will advance the UO’s academic and research enterprise to new heights. The strategic effort to secure Oregon’s place among the premiere public research universities in the nation has my complete focus and commitment. This is not an either-or proposition. We can have both world-renowned academics and athletics teams that compete at the highest levels of Division I. Just as our student athletes focus on doing their best in their respective sports, I and my leadership team will focus on advancing the UO’s excellent academic programs and helping promising programs gain strength. I hope you will join me in this effort. We have the right strategy, we have the right players, and with focus, determination, and resources from our alumni and friends, I have no question that the nation and the world will know about all of the things that make the University of Oregon a world-class institution. Go, Ducks!

Michael H. Schill President and Professor of Law

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12 Online Safety and the New Ethics of Privacy 14 Brainstorm 18 Reimagining "Early Music" 25 At School, A Shooting

intro Birds of a Feather

This feathered friend seemed unfazed by the scene at Hayward Field as Olympic hopeful Raevyn Rogers blew past her during a recent home meet. Rogersâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;who won the 800m at the NCAA Division outdoor championships last season with the fastest time ever by a freshmanâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;helped lead her team to the national title. The female duck in the photo flew off before we could ask her any questions, but watch for her, Rogers, and plenty of other webfeet at the US Olympic Track and Field Trials, July 1-10 at Hayward Field. Read a Duck-centric preview of the event on page 23.

PHOTOGRAPH BY ADAM EBERHARDT

T H E M AG A Z I N E O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F O R E G O N

intro

CAMPUS NEWS

A New Requiem SISTERS IN SONG Divisi, the UO’s allfemale singing group, made it to the 2016 finals of the International Competition of Collegiate A Cappella in New York City. The

ensemble was one of

Halls

finals of a competition

he Oregon Bach Festival will offer the world premiere of a commissioned piece, Requiem, by the celebrated Scottish composer Sir James MacMillan. The concert will be held July 2 at 7:30 p.m. in the Hult Center’s Silva Concert Hall. Artistic Director Matthew Halls, who will conduct the piece, says that offering the first performance of a major new work is an exciting opportunity for the musicians, but also a special challenge. “Performing a piece for the very first time brings musicians even closer together in a heightened spirit of collaboration,” says Halls. “We’re all searching for the meaning of the work and responding to the interpretative challenges that arise during the rehearsal period. There are no recordings to brush up on. We have to open our ears and listen in a different way as we explore and discover the secrets that lie deep within the heart of the work.” MacMillan, who will be in residence during the festival, has worked as a composer and conductor with such prominent orchestras as the London Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the BBC Philharmonic. MacMillan’s music is deeply influenced by traditional Scottish music. When the Scottish Parliament reconvened in 1999 after 292 years, a fanfare by MacMillan was played to accompany the queen into the chamber. Halls says listeners will be able to hear traces of that Scottish background in MacMillan’s Requiem. “There is very often a distinctly—and incredibly beautiful—Scottish flavor to his musical language,” Halls says. “Pipe tunes, Scotch snaps, and other such ‘exotic’ colorings are never far below the surface of his incredible orchestral and choral soundscapes.” The Oregon Bach Festival runs June 23–July 10. The festival’s diverse offerings include performances by the Punch Brothers, events for kids, and performances of masterworks by Beethoven, Brahms, Mozart, and—wait for it—Bach. Learn more at oregonbachfestival.com.

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SUMMER 2016

with more than 600 entries. They are the first all-female group to reach the finals since 2011. Divisi was the inspiration for the book and movie Pitch Perfect and one of the group’s arrangements television hit Glee.

FUNDS FOR FOREIGN STUDY Students Ava

Conover

Jamerson and Beth Baer will receive $20,000 David L. Boren Fellowships to study abroad. Jamerson will attend the Nanjing Chinese

Molleda

Flagship Center in Nanjing and Baer will attend Japan Women’s University in Tokyo. Boren Fellowships help students acquire language skills and

Lindner

experience critical to the future security and stability of the United States. Recipients agree to work in the federal government for at least a year.

Four of the Best

was featured on the

Marcus

he UO will start the 2016–17 academic year with several new deans and vice presidents, bringing a wealth of fresh energy and depth of experience to the university. The new vice president for research and innovation is David Conover. He previously held a similar position at Stony Brook University in New York State. Juan-Carlos Molleda has been named dean of the School of Journalism and Communications. He arrives from the University of Florida, where he chaired the Department of Public Relations. Taking the helm as dean of the School of Architecture and Allied Arts is Christoph Lindner. He has been a professor of media and culture at the University of Amsterdam. Andrew Marcus was named dean of the College of Arts and Sciences. He previously served as interim dean. At press time, a new dean of Lundquist College of Business had not yet been named.

Investiture

he university medallion and mace, the official symbols of the University of Oregon, will formally pass into the hands of Michael H. Schill on June 1, when campus marks the investiture of its 18th president. The ceremony will take place at 2:00 p.m. in Matthew Knight Arena. The entire community is invited, and a reception will follow in the Lee Barlow Giustina Ballroom and Donald R. Barker Courtyard at the Ford Alumni Center. “We will be celebrating our president’s successful first year, as much as formally installing him into the position,” says Chuck Lillis, chair of the University of Oregon Board of Trustees. “This will also be an opportunity for Mike to reflect on his aspirations for the future of this great institution.”

PLAY BALL!

The UO softball team began play this spring in Jane Sanders Stadium, a $17.2 million facility funded largely by a lead gift from Bob Sanders, BS ’51, to honor his late wife Jane, BS ’50. So far, the Ducks are thriving in their new digs, drawing capacity crowds to the 2,500-seat ballpark, and continuing to be ranked among the top teams in the country.

Disability Studies

new interdisciplinary minor and graduate specialization in disability studies is planned for fall 2017. Operating out of the College of Arts and Sciences, the program will include courses from architecture, English literature, law, education, gender studies, anthropology, geography, international studies, and arts and administration in an effort to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of the social, historical, and political framing of disability. “For students with disabilities, it’s crucial to have their histories, cultures, experiences, voices, and viewpoints given pride of place at the university,” says associate professor of English Elizabeth Wheeler. “These degrees will prepare students for the many kinds of disability-related careers that are expanding with the aging US population and the growth of technology. They can lead to careers in product and interior design, adaptive computing, arts and recreation, family and senior services, along with many other areas.” JANE SANDERS STADIUM BY ERIC EVANS PHOTOGRAPHY

Music to His Ears

Leve

POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT A new study, published online in the American Journal of Psychiatry, shows that positive interactions with parents can determine whether or not an at-risk child develops conduct disorders. “Even when a child has inherited a very challenging set of behaviors, hearing ‘good job’ or receiving a pat on the back can help protect that child from developing serious problems,” said UO professor Leslie Leve, a coauthor on the study and a professor in the College of Education.

obert Kyr, head of the composition and theory area of the School of Music and Dance, has been awarded one of the top prizes in the country in the field of music composition: the prestigious Arts and Letters Award given by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The award honors outstanding artistic achievement by a composer who has arrived at his or her own artistic voice. In addition to an honorarium, the award offers funds toward music recording. Kyr, Philip H. Knight Professor of Music, is an internationally recognized composer, writer, and filmmaker. He has composed 12 symphonies, three chamber symphonies, three violin concertos, a piano concerto, chamber music, and numerous works for vocal ensembles of all types. His music frequently focuses on themes of contemporary signif icance, such as peacemaking, living in harmony with nature, and spiritual themes related to love, compassion, and forgiveness. T H E M AG A Z I N E O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F O R E G O N

intro

RESEARCH

Online Safety and the New Ethics of Privacy A new center at the UO is researching ways to keep data secure while working to define privacy in the digital age. BY ROSEMARY HOWE CAMOZZI

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ot so very long ago, we closed our curtains for privacy. Security was achieved by locking our doors and windows. But now, with nearly everyone going online for research, shopping, socializing, banking, and other daily needs, these terms have taken on new meaning. Digital privacy is hard to define and even more difficult to achieve—and it comes with major legal, technical, and economic ramifications. Enter the University of Oregon’s new Center for Cyber Security and Privacy, which is also designated a National Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense Research. The center is directed by associate professor of computer and information science Jun Li, and includes representatives from computer and information science, the law and business schools, and the philosophy and information services departments. “The center is formalizing our informal networks,” says associate professor of philosophy Colin Koopman. “To Jun’s credit, he realized that there is an ethical dimension to developing computer systems, and to conceptualizing notions of privacy.” Everyone agrees that privacy is important, Koopman says, but everyone has different conceptions of what it is. “Whose privacy?” he asks. “What kinds of privacy? We need sustained inquiry in the places where new IT infrastructure is being built, not just after the fact when something goes wrong downstream.” The center’s initial research will focus on the functional and operational aspects of Internet security. “We have focused on monitoring and detecting anomalous events on the control plane, and handling malicious Internet traffic on the data plane,” Li says. The control plane regulates how different nodes, or routers, communicate with each other to enable the transfer of “packets”—units of communication that are the building blocks of e-mails, web pages, or an audio file. The packets are forwarded “hop by hop,” Li says, and then assembled at your computer. Li hopes to gain increased understanding of “Internet earthquakes” that happen frequently—including disruptive events such as a natural disaster, undersea cable cut, or large-scale power outage that causes the routing to deviate from its normal state—and malicious events, such as when attackers intercept a path and reroute users to fake websites. The data plane of the Internet is concerned with delivering Internet traffic from source to destination. A major concern in the data plane over the past decades has been the proliferation of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, when attackers flood a website with “garbage packets” and use up all its bandwidth, making it impossible for legitimate packets to get to the site. The center has received a $1.38 million award from the US Department of Homeland Security to create technology that will defend systems from these attacks. DDoS attacks can happen for a number of reasons. In 2007, during a period of protests in Estonia, attackers disabled the websites of government ministries, political parties, newspapers, banks, and more. Estonia blamed Russia for the attacks, ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREW COLIN BECK

which began after the country moved a Soviet war memorial. Attacks can also take place for more mundane reasons, such as when a player in an online game wants to maliciously freeze another player. An extreme case would be “ransom ware,” Li notes, where someone says, “Pay me, or I’ll take your website down.” None of these methods of attack are new, he says, but “the attackers’ capabilities are becoming more significant. We are studying how and where to put filters into the networks, as well as how to incentivize Internet service providers to provide this service.” Another area of research concerns online social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, where there are, of course, many security and privacy concerns. A multi-institution team led by Li recently received a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation that will be used in studies to identify and thwart fraud and attacks. “Social networks create a dilemma for their users,” Li says, “because people want both maximum privacy and maximum publicity. It will be interesting to see how that plays out.” A third area of research involves finding better methods for protecting the security and privacy of the “Internet of Things”—a phrase that refers to devices that interact with the Internet, such as watches, refrigerators, pacemakers, robotic vacuum cleaners, baby monitors, video cameras at street intersections, and more. Security researchers have exposed security vulnerabilities in everything from Hello Barbie dolls, which allowed hackers to intercept a child’s communication, to cars that can be remotely hacked so their brakes and transmission are disabled. Li cites the example of a home camera leaking a video of a baby to “unknown folks,” and the ability of someone to hack into a medical device in your body, causing it to malfunction or leak your medical data. That possibility was of enough concern to Dick Cheney’s cardiologist that he disabled Cheney’s pacemaker during his time in office to ensure that an attacker could not deliver a fatal shock to the vice president. Information garnered from hacking into Internet-connected devices could also be used in criminal investigations, says associate professor of law Carrie Leonetti, whose scholarship focuses on the constitutional right to privacy in criminal investigations. “For instance, your house turns your furnace on and off at certain times, so the metadata shows what time you come and go. This could be very useful.”

Coming up with appropriate definitions for the concepts of security and privacy is an important part of the center’s work. “Does privacy only matter if you’re doing something wrong?” Leonetti asks. “What about medical information? What if you are having an intimate conversation with someone you love? “The traditional definition of privacy was largely based on the concept of assumption of risk, so that, if you had high fences and blackout

curtains, you were not taking the risk of invasion of privacy,” she says. “But everything is different now. By not building an electronic wall, have you relinquished any expectation of privacy in your information? “We need to figure out the equivalent of closing your curtains in a digital world.” Rosemary Howe Camozzi , BA ’96, is a senior writer and editor for Oregon Quarterly.

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T H E M AG A Z I N E O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F O R E G O N

intro

RESEARCH

Brainstorm

Scientists at the University of Oregon’s new Center for Translational Neuroscience use knowledge about the brain’s structure and function to create practical fixes for some of our most vexing problems.

s te ch nolHistorically, Fisher says, the charBY MELODY WARD LESLIE ogy reveals acterization of particular mental more details about our brains’ health challenges has lacked the precision needed to inner workings, researchers in reduce them significantly. “In contrast to the strides made an emerging field—translational in the treatment of many medical illnesses, the mental neuroscience—are scouting bet- health field has lagged behind in treatment efficacy,” he ter ways to address some of the says. “Similarly, efforts to reduce the effects of societal ills problems that bedevil us. such as poverty, discrimination, and child maltreatment Psychology professors Phil have had only modest impact.” Fisher and Elliot Berkman, Fisher, a double Duck who earned his master’s at the d irectors of t he Universit y UO in 1990 and his doctorate in 1993, is expert at applying of Oregon’s new Center for basic research findings to real-world settings. In addition Translational Neuroscience, are to his Philip H. Knight Chair, he directs the UO psycholamong the leaders of an effort to develop personalized solu- ogy department’s clinical training program. tions for problems ranging from addiction and depression Berkman, an assistant professor of psycholog y, to Alzheimer’s. The stakes are huge. The National Institute directs the Social and Affective Neuroscience Lab, of Mental Health reports that one in four American adults where he’s coined the term “motivational neuroscisuffers from a diagnosable mental disorder. ence” to describe studies aimed at understanding what

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RESEARCH

is happening inside our heads when we fail to meet goals. For example, only one in 20 smokers succeeds in quitting on a given attempt. But Berkman’s use of neuroimaging in studies with people who want to stop smoking has shown that success—or lack of it—is not a simple function of willpower. It’s more a matter of learning to anticipate the very earliest clues and triggers so that you don’t “suddenly” come face-to-face with your nemesis, whether it’s a cigarette or a pile of cookies. Neuroimaging also shows that keeping your core values top of mind can boost your goals. Turns out these operate as reinforce-

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For example, it turns out that a number of common neural circuits are involved in a range of problems from obesity to ADHD and substance abuse.

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ments for the billions of neurons living within the folds of your brain. In fact, the same parts of your brain light up when you think about your motives or values as when you receive a direct reinforcement such as food or sugar. “When we saw this in our brain data,” Berkman says, “We thought, now here’s something we can use to help people.” Research like this may have universal applications. For example, it turns out that a number of common neural circuits are involved in a range of problems from obesity to ADHD and substance abuse. “Understanding these circuits may provide new clues to efficient and effective treatments,” Fisher says. The UO studies also help explain why being smart doesn’t save people from acting impulsively. “Often, goals are less about the horsepower of your mind and more about perseverance,” Berkman says. “Goal striving is less a battle of good versus evil and more like you’re

filling a tub of water. Things like habits and cravings are faster—those faucets turn on first. The slower processes, representing future-oriented thinking, come on a little later and they

Often, goals are less about the horsepower of your mind and more about perseverance.

tend to be weaker. What you’re battling for is the temperature of the water overall.” Berkman is sure we’ve barely begun to understand the inner workings of our brains. He agrees that translational neuroscience is a natural for the UO, where experts in fields ranging from genomics to social psychology and cognitive neuroscience to developmental biology have been working together in new ways since moving into the university’s integrative science building, named for donors Robert and Beverly Lewis, four years ago. This übercollaborative approach is pushing out several frontiers at once, all rich with potential applications worthy of testing by translational neuroscience. One example is the study of the human microbiome (featured in the Spring 2016 issue of Oregon Quarterly). “The fact that we each have a cloud of microbes in and around us—and how this might impact our health—wasn’t even on the radar five years ago,” Berkman says. Fisher also directs the Translational Neuroscience Initiative at Harvard University’s

Center on the Developing Child. He says one of the things that sets the UO apart is that graduate students and postdocs here are learning the newest neuroimaging techniques while receiving “the best training in applied psychology.” It’s a big claim, one he justifies by pointing to the university’s historic strengths in those areas and early investments in fMRI technology, which allowed UO scientists like Helen Neville and Michael Posner to pioneer cognitive neuroscience, the study of how the brain’s neural circuits respond to thinking and behavior. Human brain studies with f MRI do not allow researchers to see what our neurons are doing as we perform an action. However, thanks to new tools developed by biologists working across the hall from Berkman’s lab, UO scientists are the first to watch this kind of brain activity in living mice. What they learn will immediately apply to the study of mental health issues associated with early development, adolescent behavior, schizophrenia, and age-related deterioration of the brain. “The goal is to develop ways of solving big societal problems like opioid abuse,” Berkman says. “With proper funding, we can use existing information to make progress on these issues without having to start from square one.” Fisher, internationally acclaimed for his novel approaches to building resilience in children from adverse backgrounds, says he’s most excited about high-risk, high-reward ideas. “We have the highest aspirations for what collaborative, interdisciplinary science can do to address the health and well-being of people in Oregon, throughout the US, and around the globe.”

New nonstop EUG to San Jose Connecting the Silicon Shire to the Silicon Valley

Melody Ward Leslie, BA ’79, is a UO staff writer.

Visit the UO Center for Translational Neuroscience: ctn.uoregon.edu Learn more about Elliot’s findings from his blog, The Motivated Brain, located at Psychology Today, and his Social and Affective Neuroscience Laboratory webpage. He tweets as @Psychologician. For an overview of Phil Fisher’s main lines of research, read oregonquarterly.com/fostering-connections.

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MUSIC

Holly Roberts and Marc Vanscheeuwijck are two key artists in the conference.

Reimagining “Early Music” Is there anything new to discover about very old music? UO faculty members, graduate students, and the 900 attendees of a recent campus conference think so.

t’s noon on a weekday in April, 2004 to the School of Music and Dance musicology BY BONNIE HENDERSON and though it’s called a lunchbox faculty and its early music program. It’s one of the concert, no one is eating. The piece being played is a oldest buildings on campus, at the geographical center, its walls too reconstruction of a 15th-century chant, performed thin to compartmentalize or even contain the music made within: the by a soprano and a baritone, and while the harmoperfect venue, according to UO associate professor of musicology Marc nies aren’t unfamiliar, to the modern ear the Latin Vanscheeuwijck. Musicology and early music are small programs at UO, text seems off: Latin-ish somehow, its consonants barely known beyond the music school and the robust community of crunchier, German-inflected. Which, it turns out, is early music enthusiasts in Eugene. But among practitioners of historical the point. This recital—of chants originally sung in a performance practice around the world, it’s a rising star. Salzburg monastery in 1492—was part of the UO’s first Musicology, early music, musicking, historically informed performance: Musicking Conference, a week of panel discussions, the concepts overlap and sometimes collide, and all are in flux. Musicology coaching sessions, and performances open to campus refers to the scholarly research of music—the old, the new, and the paths and community alike, all free of charge. Like all the performances at the that led from one to the other. Early music used to be code for Western conference, it was “historically informed”—not merely an expression of European music of the baroque era, but as Vanscheeuwijck—himself a the performers’ virtuosic vocal practice, but the result of their painstak- baroque cellist—points out, the term is becoming increasingly “absurd” as ing research into when and where the music was composed, sung, and it has stretched to include music of the Renaissance and Middle Ages and heard, by whom and in what context. even, now, music of the 19th-century Romantic era. The focus of interest The recital took place not in a concert hall, nor even a church. It was a at the Collier House isn’t on music of a particular period in the past but living room—the main-floor salon of the 1886 Collier House, home since rather on historically informed performance, or historical performance

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practice, as it’s also called. Using period instruments—originals or replicas of the harpsichords, sackbut, baroque violins and violas da gamba, and various other instruments that predate those in use today—is often where an exploration of historical performance practice begins. “But it’s less about the instruments than how we approach the music,” Vanscheeuwijck explains: understanding a piece of music in its original context and allowing that understanding to inform how one might approach the making of that music today. “Music is an art that is an expression of a culture,” as he puts it, one influenced by social structure and religion and architecture and economics and myriad other influences. Which is why Vanscheeuwijck— who spends half the year at the UO and the other half teaching and performing in Europe— has proposed the alternative term “culturally informed performance.” Or as musicology grad student Alison Kaufman—the soprano in the lunchbox concert—puts it, “It’s about opening up the process for the audience But there is no denying the charm of baroque music, which is much of what goes on at Collier House. Its practitioners all seem to remember

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Learn more about early music at the Berwick Academy, a new initiative dedicated to “historically informed” performance at the Oregon Bach Festival. The academy runs June 15–July 6: oregonbachfestival.com/berwick-academy.

their own moment of conversion, typically as teenagers. For Alison Kaufman, it was hearing her first opera, which happened to be one of the first operas ever written, Monteverdi’s 1643 L’incoronazione di Poppea. For Margret Gries, a multiinstrumentalist and musicology instructor who also leads the Oregon Bach Collegium performance ensemble, it was the four slow, unadorned, descending notes that open Franz Biber’s circa-1674 passacaglia, as drawn from the gut strings of a baroque violin. For Marc Vanscheeuwijck, studying cello in Bruges, it was hearing chamber ensembles playing 17th-century music on period instruments—so refreshing and transparent after what he experienced as an overwhelming “ocean of sound” listening to modern orchestras at full forces.

It’s possible that the final concert of the conference—held in Central Lutheran Church across East 18th Avenue from campus—was just such an aha experience for someone in the audience. Vanscheeuwijck conducted the performance by the UO Oratorio Orchestra of Alessandro Stradella’s 1675 oratorio San Giovanni Battista. At the tip of his baton, first violinist, musicology graduate student, and lead conference organizer Holly Roberts launched the orchestra into the lively opening Sinfonia. And within minutes—seconds, maybe—Vanscheeuwijck’s tentative smile had expanded into a broad grin. “They gave a lot in rehearsal,” he later reflected, “but what they gave in concert was another 200 percent.” In the audience, Gries too was beaming. “It’s a privilege to work at the Collier House and with these students, who are just amazing: hard-working, sacrificing a great deal,” she had commented during the run-up to the conference. “I want to be sure that, every day, I give them something worth listening to, something that will be meaningful.” Bonnie Henderson, BA ’79, MA ’83, is a Eugenebased writer.

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The Influencer

Pulitzer-prize winning SOJC professor Héctor Tobar thrives on helping journalism students find their voices.

ith compasThe son of Guatemalan immigrants—his BY SHARLEEN NELSON sion and senfather a valet and hotel clerk, his mother a sitivity, he tells the stories of the keypunch operator—Tobar says he was not exposed to writoppressed and the forgotten. He ing during his childhood growing up in Little Armenia, one has reported on the drug wars of many ethnic neighborhoods in greater Los Angeles. But his in Mexico, an epidemic of kiddad did something that would have a lasting impact on him. nappings in Sao Paulo, and the He asked him to read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and escalating chaos in Iraq. He has Influence People. “I really learned a lot from that book as a kid,” given voice to the plight of menTobar says. “It was about how you should treat people with tally ill prisoners, and he has respect in your daily encounters, and if you do that then good interviewed immigrant day laborers, Latino fútbolers, and things will happen for you.” most recently, Chilean miners—the subjects of his New York Carnegie was right. Good things happened. During Times best-selling book Deep Down Dark: The Untold Stories Tobar’s distinguished career, he has worked for the New of 33 Men Buried in a Chilean Mine, and the Miracle That Set Yorker, LA Weekly, and the Los Angeles Times, among others. Them Free. Meet Pulitzer Prize–winning associate profesHe is the author of four books, and he shared the Pulitzer sor of journalism Héctor Tobar. Prize for the LA Times’ coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles

PHOTOGRAPH BY PATRICE NORMAND

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riots. Currently, he is immersed in writing his fifth book—all in addition to teaching reporting and feature writing courses at UO’s School of Journalism and Communication. He is una persona ocupada—a busy person with “many responsibilities and occupations.” Still, despite his demanding schedule, it is the SOJC students, whom he describes as incredibly “curious and intelligent,” that drive his passion for teaching. He believes students have been taught to think of writing as structured and formulaic, which results in them shaping their writing to fit what they think the professor wants. “What I do is untangle this knot of restrictions that’s kept people from being fully expressive in their work, to release their creativity and their voice,” he says. One of the key ingredients to finding your voice and becoming a better writer, according to Tobar, is a willingness to accept failure. “Failure is built into the process of writing—it’s called writing a draft,” he says. In addition to going over the students’ rough drafts in class, he shares early drafts of his own work to show how they have been edited and reworked many times before reaching

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I tell my students, whatever you try to do, you should pursue excellence, because it’s just one of the cool things about being alive. publication. “You can’t achieve the highest success you could achieve unless you failed first,” he says. “Writing isn’t easy. It’s not something you do to get rich, but if you want to change the world, if you want the opportunity to change the way people think, then yes, be a writer!” He encourages his students to explore writing both as a vehicle of expression and as literary achievement. “I just think if you’re going to become a writer, why not try to be a badass, and that if you try you will fail in many ways, but you will become a stronger writer by trying—that’s

basically my career in a nutshell—always trying to become stronger as a writer and making myself stronger in the process.” Indeed, that strength, along with his respectful approach to interviewing, has served Tobar well, whether it’s talking to a foreign dignitary or a group of Chilean miners. “I think you have to be really humble when you interview people because it’s more about the people you’re interviewing than it is about you,” he says. “So when I do an interview, I want them to feel good about it. I want them to feel good that they met me.” While students in Tobar’s classes may be exposed to some of the harsh realities of the profession—that writing isn’t easy, that failure is a given, and that they may never get rich, they will also be encouraged to enthusiastically go out and experience life and then write about it, and to aim for excellence while they’re doing it. “I tell my students, whatever you try to do, you should pursue excellence, because it’s just one of the cool things about being alive.” Sharleen Nelson, BS ’06, is a staff writer and editor with University Communications.

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ATHLETICS

Andrew Wheating English Gardner

Jenna Prandini

Ducks on the Run

The Olympic Team Trials return to Hayward Field in July, and there are plenty of Ducks to keep an eye on.

Elijah Greer

BY BEN DEJARNETTE ight years ago, with Hayward Field hosting the US Olympic Team Trials in track and field for the first time in nearly three decades, a gangly, wide-eyed UO sophomore named Andrew Wheating pulled off the unthinkable: the 20-year-old advanced to the 800-meter semifinal, then the final, and then, on the big stage’s final straightaway, he found a gear that even America’s best half-milers couldn’t match. “Wheating coming on the outside!” an incredulous NBC announcer shouted as the tall runner in green and yellow sprinted into second place. The crowd roared, the stands shook, and amid the delirium, Wheating punched an improbable ticket to the Olympic Games in Beijing. “It was as loud as I’ve ever heard Hayward Field,” recalled veteran sportswriter Curtis Anderson four years later. “My legs were literally shaking.” The US Olympic Team Trials return to Hayward for a sixth time this summer, and thanks to UO track and field’s recent success—including 11 National Collegiate Athletic Association indoor and outdoor team titles since 2010—the Oregonthemed subplots promise to be more plentiful than ever. Will Andrew Wheating, BA ’10, qualify for his third straight Olympics? Will Ashton Eaton, BA ’10, improve on his world-record performance of four years ago? Will fan favorite Jordan Hasay, BS ’13, break through and qualify for her first Olympics? Will Jenna Prandini and English Gardner earn two of the four spots on Team USA’s 4 x 100-meter squad? Phew! It’s a lot to follow, so we created a fan guide to help you—and us—keep pace at the trials. (For a full list of Ducks competing at Hayward Field, visit Oregon Quarterly’s website after the final entries are released in June.)

MEN’S 800 METERS First round: July 1 (4:15 p.m.); semifinals: July 2 (noon); final: July 4 (5:51 p.m.)

The event that sent Wheating to his first Olympic Games in 2008 now presents a similar opportunity for ELIJAH GREER, BS ’13, the Portland-area native who won two NCAA 800meter titles while at Oregon. Greer has struggled with injuries as a professional, but the 25-yearold almost always finds himself in the hunt come championship season. Greer finished sixth at the US Olympic Team Trials in 2012 and fourth at the US Championships in both 2013 and 2014. To capture the elusive top-three finish, Greer may have to contend with Wheating, who says he’s still deciding whether to compete in the 800 meters or the 1,500 meters—or both. WOMEN’S 800 METERS First round: July 1 (4:45 p.m.); semifinals: July 2 (11:43 a.m.); final: July 4 (5:42 p.m.)

For LAURA ROESLER, BS ’14, who missed most of the 2015 season with a serious Achilles injury, the Olympic trials could add another chapter to her already impressive comeback story. In March, Roesler punctuated her indoor season by finishing second at the US Indoor Championships

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Raevyn Rogers

and fourth at the World Indoor Championships, leaving no doubt that she’s a top contender for the trials. Another woman who shares that distinction is 19-year-old UO sophomore RAEVYN ROGERS , the NCAA’s defending indoor and outdoor 800-meter champion, whose personal-best time of 1:59.71 is less than a second behind Roesler’s.

in 10.21 seconds and jumping more than 27 feet through the air. This time, Eaton arrives at Hayward Field as the defending Olympic and world champion in the event, and as the overwhelming favorite to win his fourth US decathlon title. The best chance for drama will come if Eaton decides to chase his (most recent) world record of 9,045 points, which he set in Beijing last summer. Either way, the trials will be Eaton’s last decathlon before Rio, where he and his wife, Canadian heptathlete BRIANNE THEISENEATON , will try to become the first married couple to win the decathlon and heptathlon at the same Olympic Games.

honors at the NCAA Indoor Championships in March. At the trials, look for all four of these athletes to double back in the 200 meters during the second week of competition. MEN’S 5,000 METERS First round: July 4 (5:02 p.m.); final: July 9 (5:20 p.m.)

For Oregon fans who can’t stand to wait for football season to see another heavyweight battle MEN’S 10,000 METERS between the Ducks and the Cardinal, the 5,000Final: July 1 (6:15 p.m.) meter race should be a real gift. The likely UO GALEN RUPP is already guaranteed a spot on frontrunners are ERIC JENKINS, Team USA thanks to his remarkable 2:11:12 WILL GEOGHEGAN, and TREVOR marathon debut at the US Olympic Team DUNBAR, BS ’14, who helped proTrials in February. Now the six-time NCAA pel Oregon to NCAA titles in 2014 champion will race for his second US title of and 2015. Meanwhile, the univerAshton Eaton 2016 and a chance to defend the 10,000-meter sity located in Palo Alto will be silver medal he won at the London Olympics in MEN’S JAVELIN represented by GARRETT HEATH, 2012. Other Ducks to look out for include ERIC First round: July 2 (12:45 p.m.); who finished fourth in the US final: July 4 (4:25 p.m.) JENKINS, BS ’15, the 2015 NCAA runner-up, 5,000-meter final a year ago, and and PARKER STINSON , BS ’15, who placed In 2012, SAM CROUSER heaved by 14-time NCAA All-American eighth in the NCAA 10,000-meter final in 2014. the javelin 265-odd feet to finish second—a CHRIS DERRICK . Those won’t be the only five (At press time, LUKE PUSKEDRA, BS ’13, who position that usually earns a spot on Team runners in the field, of course, but for the true UO finished fourth at the US Olympic marathon USA. But because Crouser had fallen short of partisans, those will be the five to watch. trials, did not expect to compete.) the Olympic ‘A’ standard (269 feet), the UO junior didn’t get MEN’S 1,500 METERS WOMEN’S 10,000 METERS to compete at the Olympics in First round: July 7 (7:21 p.m.); semifinals: Final: July 2 (11:04 a.m.) London. Looking for redemp- July 8 (4:12 p.m.); final: July 10 (5:20 p.m.) In 2 0 0 8, when 16 -year-old tion, Crouser, BS ’15, enters this MATTHEW CENTROWITZ ’s staggering list Sam Crouser JORDAN HASAY advanced to the year’s trials with the Olympic of honors includes a bronze medal from the women’s 1,500-meter final by fin‘A’ standard already in hand, 2011 World Championships in Athletics, a ishing fifth in her semifinal heat meaning he only needs to finish silver medal from the Worlds in 2013, and a and toppling the national high in the top-three to guarantee a gold medal that he won at the World Indoor school record, her dazzling perforspot on Team USA. Another for- Championships in March. Centrowitz now mance earned a special serenade from the crowd. mer Duck to watch is 2012 Olympian CYRUS has his eyes set on Olympic gold in Rio, but “Come to Or-e-gon!” the fans in the west grand- HOSTETLER , BS ’10, whose personal best of he’ll first have to get past a stacked US 1,500stands chanted after the race. “Come to Or-e272 feet 10 inches, set at Hayward Field in 2009, meter field, including fellow Ducks ANDREW gon!” A year later, Hasay did just that, beginning ranks near the top of the field. WHEATING , MAC FLEET, BA ’14, JORDAN a remarkable four-year career in Eugene that MCNAMARA , BS ’10, DANIEL WINN , BA ’15, would include two national titles, 18 All-America WOMEN’S 100 METERS and COLBY ALEXANDER . One current UO honors, and four school records. This year, Hasay First round: July 2 (12:33 p.m.); semifinals: miler to watch out for is sophomore BLAKE will try to recreate some of that Hayward Field July 3 (4:02 p.m.); final: July 3 (5:44 p.m.) HANEY, who finished third in the NCAA 1,500magic in the 10,000 meters, which has become The Ducks should be rolling deep in the wommeter final a year ago. her specialty event since moving to Portland to en’s 100-meter dash, with ENGLISH GARDNER With apologies to Devon Allen (110-meter train professionally with the Nike Oregon Project and JENNA PRANDINI leading the way. The and coach Alberto Salazar. 2013 and 2015 NCAA 100-meter winners both hurdles), Marcus Chambers (400 meters), Phyllis Francis (400 meters), and others; qualified for the International Association of the price of UO’s track and field success is MEN’S DECATHLON Athletics Federations World Championships that their Olympic storylines don’t fit onto Day one: July 2 (first event at 9:45 a.m.); last summer, and Prandini’s season-best time a single magazine spread. For a full list day two: July 3 (first event at 10:00 a.m.) of 10.95 is currently the fastest in the US. These of Ducks competing at the US Olympic Trials, visit Oregon Quarterly’s website ASHTON EATON put on a clinic at the Olympic two former Ducks figure to be joined in the after the final entries are released in June. trials four years ago, smashing the decathlon 100-meter field by at least two current Ducks, world record by 13 points and pulling off ridicu- sophomore HANNAH CUNLIFFE and junior Ben DeJarnette, BA ’13, MA ’15, is a Portland-based lous feats of athleticism like sprinting 100 meters JASMINE TODD, who earned All-American freelance journalist.

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At School, A Shooting A winner in Oregon Quarterly's 2016 Northwest Perspectives Essay Contest, this piece caught the attention of our judge, Pulitzer Prize finalist Karen Russell, with its "economy, directness, and searing honesty." She writes, "Like the best writing, it asks more questions than it answers, and succeeds at transferring the author's visceral feelings and concerns

into the reader's body." The author is a 2011 graduate. hen I try to pay much I need this transaction to be norBY DREW TERHUNE for my coffee, the mal. Coffee’s free all over the city, she tells woman—girl, maybe—refuses. me, because everyone in Roseburg needs love today. She “We all need a little love right doesn’t say it’s because of the shooting. I don’t know if now,” she says, smiling. I insist that’s the company line or her personal choice. But even that she take my money. She unspoken, the silence between us is electrified by it. First refuses again. “I’m not going to it’s in my chest, heavy and hot, and it next moves up into take your money, sir.” She seems my head, filling it with buzz and hum. Then it’s in my concerned now, her smile waneyes, and I finally recognize the feeling. I’m about to cry, ing. I think she can feel how for the first time in two days.

ILLUSTRATION BY ANDREA MONGIA

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The news repeats the things we already know, but we’re not listening. But I don’t. I smile, and I say thank you, and I drive back to my parents’ house. I’m breathing heavier, and my heart is racing, but I haven’t cried yet. I won’t do that until the funeral. Thirty-six hours earlier, I was working in a Starbucks, trying to use the change of scenery to get over a little writer’s block. Like any good millennial I was checking Facebook. And just after 11 I saw my news feed fill with the same headline: “BREAKING NEWS: Police responding to an active shooting at Umpqua Community College. Police reporting that one person has been shot.” I wish I could remember what I thought about first, how I was feeling, but I can’t. Another person used my hands to text my mother: “Where is Bryce?” Bryce is my brother, and a student there. She responds a minute later, maybe two: “At home. He didn’t have class today.” I couldn’t text my brother first. I couldn’t sit in a crowded Starbucks and wait for him to tell me he wasn’t dead. Next I text my aunt. She is a student there, too. “Yo, are you ok? I just heard about the shooting.” Five minutes later, she replies: “Yes.” Later she will call me and tell me about how she was on her way to the bathroom

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before class. About how a friend of hers came around the corner, running. Screaming. About how they ran, and about how she wondered if she was too slow and old to get away. About being in lockdown. About waiting. Next I call my sister. She lives here in Eugene with me now. Today is her fourth day of college. She is crying. So I pack my things, and I get on the bus, and I go to her dorm. We sit in the lounge and watch the news. Her friends from Roseburg filter in and out. The news repeats the things we already know, but we’re not listening. We’re poring over Facebook and Twitter, reading messages like “has anyone seen my son?” and “we haven’t heard from my sister yet.” Go to UCC, some answers say. No, they’re being evacuated to the fairgrounds, say others. (The latter turns out to be true.) Eventually my sister decides to go to class. I call her later. Nothing is confirmed in the news yet, but some families are sharing their news themselves. A few people she knew from high school, she says. They were all in a writing class, on their fourth day of college. “People keep asking me if I know anyone,” she says. “I don’t know how to explain to them.”

I know exactly what she means. I remember being five years old, sitting next to my mother in a classroom at UCC. I was coloring, and she was going to be a nurse. I remember being seven or eight, sitting next to my dad in psychology class. I was supposed to color, but I remember watching the movies they watched instead. I remember my mom’s graduation, and my grandmother’s, and my dad’s, and my grandfather’s. I remember watching my sister’s dance recitals. Two a year, maybe three, for 10 years. And swimming lessons at the pool there in the summertime. All day, we weren’t waiting to see if we knew someone. In a town like Roseburg, we were sure that we would. We were only counting the degrees that separated us from loss. In the morning, I got ready for work. I had just finished shaving when my mother texted. “Where are you?” I knew what that meant: someone we knew had been killed. I looked at my phone for a while, deciding what to text back. I called instead. She told me the name. Told me that she didn’t want my sister to be alone when she found out. They were going to release the names soon, my mom said. So I called my sister’s roommate and asked where my sister’s class was. I lied and said I wanted to surprise her with a coffee after her first college quiz. Instead, I escorted her outside, and I told her that the first boy she ever went on a date with, a boy she had known since she was five years old, had been murdered in his writing class on his fourth day of college, and that our mom was with his mom. And I hugged her as she cried, as she said “I want to go home.” So we go home. Straight to his mother’s house. Now, I’ve been around death. Deaths caused by cancer, by old age, by accidents. But in his mother’s house, I have no words. They dry up in my mouth, in my throat, in my chest. I want to explain what it was like to talk with her, to hear what happened, but those words never came back. On Monday, my sister and I go back to Eugene. She tries to go back to class and I try to go back to work. She mostly succeeds; I don’t. That night, we go to the candlelight vigil on campus. There are speeches, and some music. People I know from work come and hug me. They tell me they’re sorry for my loss. “It’s not my loss,” I want to tell them. But I am their connection to loss, and so I do my best approximation of a smile and I accept their hugs and their condolences. They say things

about guns, about violence, about the National Rifle Association. It’s what good progressives are supposed to say. And even though I agree, I hate them for saying it. Someone from the local news asks for an interview. My sister and her roommate say yes. As they are prepping, the reporter says that she is from Aurora, Colorado. That her sister bailed on plans to see the premiere of The Dark Night Rises at the theater where a gunman opened fire. “Did you know anyone?” she asks. “It’s a small town,” my sister’s roommate says. “Of course we did.” On Friday, the President of the United States visits my high school. He goes into the cafeteria and meets with the families of the dead, who wait for him in circles that each have an empty chair. I wonder if anyone told him, before he went inside, that in 2006 a young man was shot in the back right outside that room, just before school started one morning. Some of us were on the way to class. I was on the way to a bus, to go to a debate tournament. Just as we got to the door, everyone stopped, and the crowd parted. We saw blood, and we ran. Our teacher came out, yelling for us to get in the classroom. We packed in like sardines. I borrowed a friend’s cell phone and called my mom. “There’s been a shooting at school,” I told her. “I’m ok.” When I got home later that day, after the police let us leave, my mother hugged me and cried. Sobbed. I didn’t understand why; I was safe, and no one had died. That doesn’t make the news, at least none that I watch. Instead they show protesters with their signs: “OBAMA GO HOME” and “NOBAMA” mostly. Many are misspelled. The reporters mock them with glee. It’s meaningless. It’s spectacle. So of course it’s live. On Saturday, we get up, and we get dressed, and we go to a church. It used to be a gymnastics center. I remember walking on the balance beams there when I was four or five. But now it’s a church, and there’s a funeral to go to. Later, after the funeral, my sister and I are alone. “If I die in a shooting, I want you to do the talking about me,” she says. “I know you’ll know what to say.” I think of being 16, the day after the shooting in 2006. Of my mother, crying. I have no idea what to say. Drew Terhune is a freelance writer and designer

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with a BA from Oregon in Classics and History. T H E M AG A Z I N E O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F O R E G O N

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MUSIC

Andrei Andreev practicing on the DeArmond piano.

Major Keys

The jackpot of pianos available at the UO SOMD

n Beall Concert Hall, Andrei Andreev Professor Alexandre Dossin, he commented on the remarkBY ED DORSCH performs a Mozart concerto for his felable selection of pianos. low piano students. Their critiques help him prepare “Our pianos are that good. And we have a variety, which is important. for an upcoming competition. So does the piano: a Certain instruments are better for certain compositions. And there’s also nine-foot Steinway concert grand they call “The personal taste. The pianos are all different. Like wines. You have this wine DeArmond” in honor of the couple who donated it. for this, and this wine for that." It’s the same caliber of instrument you’d find in “Because they have the names of the donors on them, I feel really a major recording studio or concert hall. The UO’s personal about it. I don’t say ‘Give me piano number three.’ I say the School of Music and Dance now boasts four of them, name of the family who donated it. It’s alive. It’s part of a cycle of making us unique among our peers—and a global generosity.” destination for piano students. That cycle continued this March, when the school welcomed its newest For Andreev, a graduate student from Russia, addition: the American Giustina. Adding new Steinways to the collection the Steinways have helped move his performances is important because (unlike wine or a Stradivarius) pianos don’t improve beyond playing the right notes at the right times. with age. Strings tug constantly with up to 30 tons of pressure. More than “When I play on the practice room pianos, they just have the things you need 1,000 moving parts get soft. to improve your technique,” he says. “When I play the big pianos, it gives you Thanks to donors, talented pianists—students and pros alike—will be something you can create in the moment. This is the moment of creating art.” creating art in Beall Hall for years to come. Even for touring pros, the Steinways are impressive. When Grammy Award–winner Emanuel Ax led a master class in Beall Hall, says Ed Dorsch, BA ’94, MA ’98, is a UO staff writer.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY STEVE SMITH

THE PIANOS Steinway’s flagship Model D pianos are manufactured in Hamburg, Germany, or in New York, at a cost upwards of $150,000. The Hamburgs and the Americans have different styles, and each piano has its own distinct sound and personality. THE GIUSTINA Donor: Jacqueline Giustina, BA ’43 • 2006 Hamburg • Bigger, more powerful sound • Action more responsive to demanding, repetitive playing • Better for more technical performances

THE DeARMOND Donors: Leona, BS ’51, and Robert DeArmond, BBA ’52 • 2007 Hamburg • Warm, expressive • Better for intimate pieces with a quieter tone palette • More sensitive dynamic responds well to soft or loud playing

Where independent research, education and recovery programs come together for social change.

Join the movement.

THE SCHNITZER Donors: Thelma, BMus ’40, and Gilbert Schnitzer, BS ’40 • 2009 American • A bigger, fuller sound characteristic of the New York–built American Steinways • Unlike the pure, bell-like sound of the Hamburgs, Americans have a more complex tone • The design of the American Steinway keys creates an accelerated action that makes them repeat notes more quickly than the Hamburgs

THE AMERICAN GIUSTINA •

The school’s newest piano arrived this March, thanks to the generosity of Jacqueline Giustina. Dossin had the opportunity to try several pianos at Steinway’s Los Angeles showroom, as part of a rigorous selection process.

MentalHealthExcellence.org T H E M AG A Z I N E O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F O R E G O N

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PROFILE CAMPUS NEWS

TINY WONDERS

They’re the oldest, smallest, most plentiful—and definitely most essential—life forms on Earth. Microbes are a source of endless fascination for University of Oregon biology professor Brendan Bohannan, who studies how humans interact with microorganisms, such as bacteria, fungi, and viruses, that are ubiquitous in our natural environment—and in our bodies. “We have more genes in us from our microbes than we do from our lineage as humans,” says Bohannan, who won a 2015–16 Fund for Faculty Excellence Award. Much of his research has focused on microbial diversity in outdoor environments, including rainforests in the Amazon and in the West African country of Gabon, where he’s been assessing how deforestation affects microbial diversity in the soil. Closer to home, Bohannan is working with zebrafish, tracking them throughout their life cycle to see how diet, genetics, and immune response affect their microbial diversity. And he’s also part of an interdisciplinary team studying the changing microbial makeup of the Shuar people of Ecuador, once isolated but now adopting a more Western lifestyle. With colleagues at the College of Education, he’s researching how adoption affects the microbiomes of children. “The overarching topic in all of this,” he says, “is how humans and human activity influence the microbial world.”

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Brendan

Bohannan

SUMMER 2016

PROFESSOR OF BIOLOGY AND ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES BY ROSEMARY HOWE CAMOZZI

PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF BRENDAN BOHANNAN

RAISE A GLASS

Oregon is the only state to have an official microbe: Saccharomyces cerevisiae, otherwise known as brewer’s yeast and a key component of craft beer.

WHO OWNS YOUR POOP?

BOOKMARKS

Among the newest books by Duck authors are new works of fiction, history, humor, and advice on the opportunity for growth that climate change provides. Read more at oregonquarterly.com/bookmarks-su16.

That’s the question of the year, now that researchers can sequence the DNA of microbes that exist symbiotically with humans. Many questions have arisen as to whether these microbes should be considered part of, or separate from, the human body. “Now that they can have this information about you,” Bohannan says, “there are many ethical implications."

SHOE DOG: A MEMOIR BY THE CREATOR OF NIKE (SCRIBNER, 2016) BY PHIL KNIGHT, BBA ’59

RAINFOREST VS. FARM

TRANSFORMATIONAL RESILIENCE (GREENLEAF PUBLISHING, 2016) BY BOB DOPPELT

Bohannan’s studies have found that while farms have more types of microbes than forests, every soil sample from a farm looks alike. In a forest, each sample is drastically different. Rainforests provide many services to humans, including the consumption of methane, while farms pump methane into the atmosphere. Bohannan is curious whether methane-eating microbes can be introduced into farmland.

TEACHING BEYOND THE LECTURE

Bohannan says his approach to teaching—no long lectures—is novel in the sciences. Building on his belief that students should play an active role in the teaching and learning process, he lets his students help shape each course. “Teaching is the most important thing that I do,” he says. “It’s the largest impact I’ll have as a professor. It’s fun to be at Oregon where that is valued.”

WORKING TOGETHER

Bohannan, who previously taught at Stanford University, says the UO is one of the most collaborative institutions he’s encountered. “It’s easy to collaborate between faculty and departments,” he says, “and we are rewarded for that. The questions are so thorny now that it takes people from many disciplines to solve them.”

This is the story of the founding and building of one of the most successful brands in the world. The book will particularly appeal to readers who are interested in entrepreneurship and the challenges of starting and developing a business. One reviewer describes it as a “touching, highly entertaining adventure odyssey with much to teach about innovation and creativity.”

Climate change could be an opportunity to learn, grow, and even flourish. So argues Doppelt, an adjunct professor at the UO, in this new book. Doppelt urges us to look for ways to become more resilient in our responses to the traumatic effects of climate disruption so that we can avoid reactions that damage ourselves and our society and instead find new meaning, direction, and hope in life.

LAST WORDS OF THE HOLY GHOST (UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS PRESS, 2015) BY MATT CASHION, MFA ’96

Winner of the Katherine Ann Porter Prize in Short Fiction, Kirkus Reviews describes the book as “a dozen colorful short stories set in the heart of darkness that is rural America . . . The real gift of these stories is that they center on some absurdity but never really make fun of the people they’re portraying . . . A sublime collection that uses compassion and subtle humor to capture heavy moments in lives lived on the margins.”

REBELLION, MURDER AND A PULITZER PRIZE (GROUNDWATERS PUBLISHING, 2015) BY JOE R. BLAKELY

Written by a former employee of the public safety office at the UO, this book chronicles the murder trial of Llewellyn Banks. A wealthy orchardist and newspaper publisher from Medford, Banks was also one of the leaders of an effort to overthrow the government of Jackson County. The book includes portions of the trial transcript and analysis by newspaper reporters of the day.

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Drying huckleberries at Meadow Creek Forest Camp, in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest

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LEFT: COMMONS@FLICKR, RIGHT: JUSTIN SULLIVAN—GETTY IMAGES

A WORLD

AFLAME A UO research project explores the effects of climate change on Northwest tribes. BY NATHAN GILLES

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N JULY 2002, a barrage of lightning strikes set southwestern Oregon’s rugged Kalmiopsis Wilderness ablaze. The Biscuit Fire would burn for more than five months, scorching half a million acres in its path. For nearby American Indian tribes, the fire provided an opportunity to discuss their concern that climate change was striking at the heart of their cultures. They found a sympathetic ear in University of Oregon researcher Kathy Lynn, MRCP ’01. A recent graduate of the UO’s Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management, Lynn was then working for the Office of Tribal Relations of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), which sent

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her to find out how recent fires had affected local tribes. “They were talking about these profound changes on the landscape,” she remembers. “Fires were a big concern.” Environmental impacts from climate change, including more frequent fires that are larger, hotter, and more destructive—are expected to transform ecologies. Because many tribes consider natural resources to be synonymous with their cultural and spiritual identity, they perceive a threat not only to tribal resources but also to their cultural survival. Concerned by what she’d heard, Lynn cofounded the Pacific Northwest Tribal Climate Change Project. A collaborative effort between the UO’s Environmental Studies Program and the USDA Forest Service Pacific Northwest Research Station, the project acts as a clearinghouse for information on how tribes in the Northwest and elsewhere are responding to climate change.

of Lynn’s work. “Indigenous people have done little to create climate change, but the impacts of climate change are being disproportionately borne by them,” she says. There are 567 federally recognized tribes in the United States. An additional 70 tribes are recognized by individual states, and some tribes are not recognized at all. The result is a patchwork of sovereign tribal governments, many of which are now employing researchers to investigate climate impacts. Lynn has done a lot to raise awareness about tribes’ climate concerns. Among her more prominent efforts, she has authored numerWHAT’S AT STAKE ous peered-reviewed studies including several in the prestigious Imagine a world where salmon, one of the bedrocks of journal Climatic Change, which in 2014 devoted an entire issue to your culture, die in hot, low-running rivers and streams. the subject of tribes and climate change. She was a lead author of A world where plants you gathered with your granda chapter covering indigenous peoples and climate change in the mother, used for subsistence and sacrament, disappear recent National Climate Assessment, arguably the nation’s definifrom the only place you are legally allowed to gather tive climate science document. Lynn has also worked hard to help them. A world where wildfires burn seemingly endtribes find funding for their efforts and create a set of legal and ethical guidelines for nontribal organizations working with tribes. In the process she’s built a network that’s grown from an initial list of 12 interested individuals to more than 350 people. Her close collaborators at the UO include Mark Carey, associate professor of history and associate dean of the Robert D. Clark Honors College; Stephanie LeMenager, Barbara and Carlisle Moore Distinguished Professor in English and American Literature; and Kari Norgaard, associate professor of sociology and environmental studies and author of the book Living in Denial: Climate Change, Emotions, and Everyday Life (a look at why climate science is so hard for many of us to accept). Since 2009, Lynn has mentored 24 graduate and undergraduate students from multiple departments in the College of Arts and Sciences, as well as in the School of Law and the Department of Planning, Public Policy and Management. Many of these students have been American Indian and Alaska Native students who have gone on to work on climate-change issues for their Far left: Cous flowers; center: Chinook salmon; right: red huckleberries tribes. “One of the reasons I am so grateful to be part of the university is that I can extend opportunities for research to native students,” says Lynn. lessly during the summer and fall, engulfing your home What’s unique about the efforts of tribes, she says, is how they in smoke and ushering in new ecosystems. have managed to connect traditional knowledge to Western science. These are just a handful of the climate change threats “I think that many tribes, particularly in this region, recognize that that scientists believe Northwest Indian tribes will face science may aid traditional knowledge and understanding,” she says. in the future, and they’re part of the growing list Lynn has been compiling. Lynn, an upbeat woman in her early 40s with long GATHERING RIGHTS brown hair graying at the temples, is sitting in a large As summer approached, the little girl and her great-grandmother open room with thick pine poles that stretch to a vaulted would go into the hills to gather cous. The short stubby plant had bright ceiling. The glossy poles and surrounding pine walls yellow flowers that grew bunched together, coloring the hillsides. The little girl knew, because her great-grandmother had told her, transform the pallid Oregon sun streaming in through the that they weren’t after the flowers, pretty as they were. They wanted picture windows. This is the Many Nations Longhouse on the roots, which they would smash and form into small edible bisthe UO campus, a home away from home for American cuits that the sun would dry. But cous looked strikingly similar to Indian and Alaska Native students, a sacred space, and a another biscuitroot species, or at least it did to the little girl. Learning comfortable setting to discuss the uncomfortable nature Northwest tribes, says Lynn, have taken the lead in this effort, with some nine tribes currently employing the latest climate science to assess how “first foods” (such as salmon and huckleberries) and plants used for weaving baskets are expected to fare under a climate-changed world. That these scientific efforts are being aided by the tribes’ traditional knowledge is a testament to the keen observations of peoples with long tenures on their lands.

LEFT: MATT LAVIN (CC BY-SA 2.0), CENTER: ZUREKS (CC BY-SA 3.0), RIGHT: LESLIE SEATON (CC BY 2.0)

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the difference took time and patience, both of which her great-grandmother had in abundance. And if looking at them didn’t work, she could always smell the plants. The right ones had a peppery smell, her grandmother would tell her with a sparkle in her eyes. “She was always teaching and always telling me stories and looking to see if I was paying attention and understanding what she was saying,” says Cheryl Shippentower, a plant ecologist for the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, a federation of Cayuse, Umatilla, and Walla Walla Tribes in eastern Oregon. Shippentower says her great-grandmother’s patience, love, and knowledge around gathering her people’s first foods—cous, huckleberries, chokecherries, and other plants—kindled in her a love of science and stewardship that eventually led to her botany degree. Now in her late 40s and a grandmother herself, Shippentower still travels the same hills. The effects of climate change, she says, can be seen everywhere. “Plants are blooming and budding earlier and our windows [for gathering] are just getting shorter and shorter. We are so dependent on first foods; these changes really affect us.” In January 2016, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced that 2015 had been the latest in a series of warmest years on record for the planet. Last year was also the warmest year for Oregon and Washington. Since 2013, both states had suffered under the same drought that has parched California. It was a rare glimpse into a future Shippentower doesn’t care for. “In June, it looked like August,” she says. “We weren’t able to get any chokecherries due to extreme weather the previous fall. The huckleberries didn’t get

was a full 70 days earlier than expected. In April, the Confederated Tribes and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife, concerned the waters would be too low and too hot for the salmon to reach their spawning ground upriver, decided to truck the fish there instead. Chinook salmon now top the list of first foods threatened by climate change, according to a recent analysis performed by the Confederated Tribes. Cous and huckleberries are next on the list. The rising temperatures are expected to lead both cous and huckleberries to seek cooler climates farther north and at higher elevations. “Plant migration is a real issue for our first foods,” Shippentower says. “We could potentially lose those foods if they become unavailable within our traditional gathering areas.” Recognized tribes currently have rights, guaranteed by their treaties, to gather food, hunt, and fish on many of their traditional lands, even if those lands lie outside their reservations. Ecosystems, of course, don’t recognize these arbitrary boundaries and neither will climate change. Traditional plants may not only leave these boundaries but also take other first foods with them, including game animals that eat the plants. Lynn says gathering rights may need to be reconsidered. If not, she says, climate-changed landscapes could effectively make many tribes “climate refugees” on their ancestral lands. Accelerating these landscape changes is another climate impact, the one that initially sparked Lynn’s project: wildfires. But here, too, tribes are combining science and traditional knowledge to find a solution.

A NEW (OLD) LOOK AT FIRE

More than 10.1 million acres were affected by wildfires in the United States last year. All told, some 2.7 million acres burned in Oregon, Washington, and California alone, according to the National Interagency Fire Center, a multiagency federal effort to track wildfires. And according to the scientific literature, this trend of large fires is going to continue into the future as climate change creates warmer, drier conditions. Because many of these fires are likely to burn in national forests and national parks next to Indian reservations, tribes are understandably concerned about health effects from the smoke. But the tribes have another concern as well: the fires are expected to burn so hot that it could be difficult for native plants to reestablish themselves. Meanwhile, invasive species and plants migrating from the south will move in and take over. This transition, say researchers, will be abrupt—the plant-world equivalent of a regime change. And it could come as quickly as the middle of this century. Adding fuel to these fires is a history of fire suppression in the West, which has resulted in too much understory vegetation and a lot of spindly trees—in other words, a tinderbox. But fire could also be a part of the solution, says Frank Lake, a research ecologist at the USDA Forest Services Pacific Southwest Researcher Station in Orleans, California, and a coauthor with Lynn on several studies. “When we talk about prescribed fire,

We have 100 years of Smokey the Bear, and people view fire as dangerous and bad. And it can be, but that’s not the only thing it can be. enough snow cover for insulation, so the crop was poor. We’re seeing damage to our plants. And the rivers were really low and the temperatures really high.” The Umatilla River, where tribes fish for Chinook salmon, reached its peak height on February 10, 2015. This

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I feel, as both a tribal person and a scholar, that there is a real lack of appreciation of the use of fire by tribes across the Pacific Northwest, and how that relates to ecological diversity.

we’re really talking about prescribed medicine,” Lake says. “But we don’t want too much medicine. Too much medicine is as bad for ecosystems as it is for bodies.” Lake is a descendent on his father’s side of the Karuk people, whose ancestral homeland includes the area where he now works in the Six Rivers National Forest. He is also an expert on the traditional use of fire by Native Americans. “I feel, as both a tribal person and a scholar, that there is a real lack of appreciation of the use of fire by tribes across the Pacific Northwest, and how that relates to ecological diversity,” says Lake. Lake’s work is part of a new wave of research that’s dispelling a notion many of us learned in grade school: that when Europeans came to America they encountered a wilderness untouched by humans. Through a mix of sociological and ecological research, Lake’s work has shown the opposite. To take just one example, the Karuk used prescribed burns to cultivate everything from morel mushrooms (for eating) to beargrass (for basket weaving). Other researchers have found similar findings. The Willamette Valley is the home of the Kalapuya people, who historically used fire to turn the pine-dominated valley into the savannah-like landscape of oak trees and grasslands it is today. They used acorns collected from oak trees to make a kind of porridge, and the grasses attracted the game animals they hunted. Lake says the traditional use of fire could be used to encourage the presence of first foods and other traditional plants while also acting as prescribed burns to help clear out understory growth, lessening the fuel that would power the monster fires expected in the future. The key, he says, is to find the sweet spot where cool-burning, controlled fires can create a landscape of fire-adapted traditional plants that can help edge out the coming super-fire regime of the future. He doesn’t have to go far for an example of what that might look like. The Karuk has its own fire and forestry program, and, for the past three years, the tribe, in collaboration with the nonprofit Nature Conservancy and local and federal officials, has conducted a series of prescribed burns in the fall. Connected to the Karuk’s World Renewal Ceremony, a yearly ritual that seeks ecological and spiritual balance through fire, the Karuk are hoping to use fire to adapt their lands to climate change. UO researcher Kari Norgaard is aiding this effort. “We have 100 years of Smokey the Bear, and people view fire as dangerous and bad. And it can be, but that’s not the only thing it can be,” she says. Norgaard is currently working with the Karuk to investigate how fires will affect the tribe’s access to first foods,

roughly three-quarters of which are connected to fire in some way. Following years of fire suppression, the Forest Service is now more open to the use of prescribed burns. The Bureau of Indian Affairs is also encouraging the traditional use of fire as part of its wildfire management program, including burning on traditional gathering lands outside official reservations. Norgaard says all this points to a changing attitude about fire that’s coming just in time. “There is a lot of traditional knowledge about how fire is medicine. Hopefully we will be able to show how this medicine is needed more than ever,” she says.

PLANNING AHEAD

Lynn recalls being in Haiti in September 1998 as a 23-year-old Peace Corps volunteer. Everyone knew Hurricane Georges was coming, but there was no sense of urgency. She sat on her host family’s porch, watching as the strong winds forced the palm trees in front of her from their normal vertical position to a horizontal one. Then came a torrential downpour. Lynn’s thoughts went to her trees. When she had arrived some two years earlier, she had found barren hillsides, the result of a local economy based on making charcoal. The process had denuded the landscape, making the hillsides prone to landslides and erosion. Over the next two years, Lynn would help plant some 1,000 trees, mostly fruit-bearing. The trees would help buffer her village from the hurricane, holding the hills in place. When she visited years later, she was invited inside a local home and served limeade made from one of her trees. Lynn tells this story in the Longhouse as a heavy rain falls, the result of one of the largest and most unpredictable El Niños on record. The point of the story, says Lynn, is the choices we make at the local level matter, even if we can’t stop the approaching storm. “How we retain our cultures and communities within the context of climate change is all about the choices we make,” she says. Nathan Gilles, MS ’11, is a science writer based in Vancouver, Washington. T H E M AG A Z I N E O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F O R E G O N

The Great Sneaker 38

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THREE DECADES AGO, UO-TRAINED SHOE DESIGNERS CREATED A NEW GENERATION OF BASKETBALL SHOES THAT CHANGED FOREVER THE WAY WE THINK ABOUT ATHLETIC FOOTWEAR. B Y R YA N J O N E S

Revolution

inker Hatfield, BArch ’77, was on an airplane, somewhere high above the Pacific, when the realization struck. Just a few years into his new ca re er as a n at h let ic fo ot wea r designer at Nike, Hatfield was on his way home from Tokyo with fellow designer Mark Parker, who was still a couple of decades away from leading the company as CEO. They had traveled east to solve some production puzzles for a new shoe they were designing, a still-in-development hybrid of sorts called the Air Trainer. The name, generic and vague, didn’t exactly inspire a sense of the revolution it implied, but in that moment, Hatfield knew. “I remember looking at this prototype, and it was just so different, and difficult to even describe,” Hatfield says. “Mark and I are sitting on this plane, thinking, ‘Man, if we can make this . . . this is going to change the way people look at shoes.’” History long ago proved Hatfield prophetic. Released in 1987, the Nike Air Trainer 1 was like nothing before it: an T H E M AG A Z I N E O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F O R E G O N

HATFIELD MORE THAN ANYONE PERSONIFIES THE LINEAGE OF TECHNOLOGIC AND STYLISTIC INNOVATION THAT RUNS THROUGH THAT FAMOUS COMPANY IN BEAVERTON AND THROUGHOUT THE INDUSTRY IT CAME TO DOMINATE. amalgam of traits borrowed from running shoes, basketball high-tops, and the sort of generic “training” shoes one might wear to lift weights or ride a stationary bike at the gym, it managed—somehow, in spite of its Frankensteinian origins—to look cool. It wasn’t the first athletic shoe designed with versatility in mind, but it was the first to effectively pair visual appeal with performance—and certainly the first to be marketed with help from John McEnroe and (briefly, if without consent) the Beatles. Its release remains one of the watershed moments in the industry. In the 30 years since, of course, that industry has grown into one that generates billions of dollars annually, reaching far beyond the confines of hardwood courts and grass fields to infiltrate, and influence, global popular culture. The shoes, and the collectors who obsess over them, have inspired books and documentary films. Rappers make their case alongside world-class athletes for signature lines in their name. An army of savvy buyers and resellers has created a multimillion-dollar secondary market. And last year, the Brooklyn Museum hosted The Rise of Sneaker Culture, an exhibition that examined “the evolution of the sneaker from its beginnings to its current role as status symbol and urban icon.” Sneakers are now high art. “At the end of the day, when you think Nike, you think amazing-looking shoes,” says Ben Osborne, editor of the book SLAM Kicks: Basketball Sneakers That Changed the Game. “Technology matters, advertising matters, signing amazing athletes matters, but it’s really about the shoes. You can’t overemphasize the visual genius there.” In that, the influence of designers like Hatfield, now Nike’s vice president for innovation and creative concepts, has played a pivotal and lasting role. A still-thriving legend in the design field, Hatfield more than anyone personifies the lineage of technologic and stylistic innovation that runs through that famous company in Beaverton and throughout the industry it came to dominate. A lineage, of course, that has Duck prints all over it.

***

In the beginning, they were just sneakers, canvas-sided, rubber-soled footwear made for kids at play. For most of the 20th century, a small handful of models and brands—the Converse Chuck Taylor All Star, the Adidas

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Superstar—became widespread and familiar enough in the United States to register as classics of a sort, but only because they’d managed to endure. The idea that these cheap, no-tech, disposable items could have any use beyond grubby utility was too strange to even consider. The first signs of change came in the 1970s, when Adidas gave NBA superstar Kareem-Abdul Jabbar a signature shoe—quite literally; his signature and silhouette were printed on the shoe’s tongue—and Puma released a sleek, suede-leather model named for NBA All-Star Walt “Clyde” Frazier. Kids could own a piece of their heroes, and— because basketball shoes translate rather better to casual everyday use than baseball spikes or hockey skates—they could wear them, too. Then came the early 1980s, and an early convergence of the trends that would define the coming decades: just as more and more athletes signed deals that identified them with certain sneaker brands, Adidas Superstar–clad rappers Run-D.M.C. helped push hip-hop and sneaker culture into the national consciousness. Nike had been making popular basketball shoes since the early ’70s, but—unsurprisingly for a company founded by passionate track-and-field veterans Phil Knight, BBA ’59, and Bill Bowerman—most of its efforts at innovation had gone into revolutionizing running shoes. That changed, loudly and comprehensively, with the 1985 release of the Air Jordan 1. Ironically, given Nike’s reputation for relentless technological advancement, the single most iconic model in the history of athletic shoes was not a great leap forward in performance. But Michael Jordan was. With the combination of his dazzling, dynamic game, the shoe’s bold red-and-black color scheme, and Nike’s

OPPOSITE PAGE: TINKER HATFIELD, BA rch ’77, CIRCA 1990. ARE THOSE TASSEL LOAFERS HE’S WEARING? ABOVE: THE AIR JORDAN III, DATING TO 1988 AND SIGNED BY ITS NAMESAKE, MICHAEL JORDAN, WAS AN EARLY EXAMPLE OF A SHOE THAT INCLUDED VISIBLE NIKE AIR TECHNOLOGY IN ITS HEEL. THE SHOE WAS DESIGNED BY HATFIELD. OPENING SPREAD: A SKETCH AND A FULLY REALIZED SHOE—THE AIR TRAINER I, RELEASED IN 1987.

emerging marketing approach, the Jordan 1 was a sensation. The shoe’s success was helped greatly by the NBA’s insistence on fining Jordan for wearing a design that clashed with its uniform standards, fines that Nike happily covered and capitalized on with a memorable commercial campaign—and so it remains: even today, untold millions of pairs later, reissued versions of the Jordan I regularly outsell most new basketball sneakers. For Nike, and for the industry, nothing was ever the same. Scott Reames, BA ’89, Nike’s longtime corporate historian, understands better than most the company’s unlikely path to global marketing powerhouse. Nodding to the possibly apocryphal story of Phil Knight introducing himself to ad man Dan Wieden in the early ’80s with the pronouncement, “I hate advertising,” Reames says Knight’s early philosophy emphasized the importance of “word of foot.” “It was about one athlete talking to another,” Reames says. “That’s where he saw the strength and power of the brand.” In the wake of the Air Jordan 1—and thanks in no small part to that ad man’s firm, Wieden+Kennedy—Nike entered an era in which innovation in both marketing and design roared forward on nearly parallel paths. Converse, whose Chuck Taylors had helped create the modern sneaker industry back in 1917, interrupted that momentum briefly in 1986 with the Weapon, worn and endorsed by established stars Larry Bird and Magic Johnson. But from there, and for years to come, seemingly all the buzz, influence, and innovation in the industry would have its origins at Nike. Wilson Smith, BArch ’80, came to the company in 1983, a few years after graduating from the School of Architecture and Allied Arts, which he says instilled in him an understanding of the importance of “form following function, of really paying attention to the context of what you’re designing, and whom you’re designing it for.” In Beaverton, he found the perfect setting to implement that philosophy. Hired by Hatfield as an assistant in Nike’s corporate architecture office, he soon followed his mentor into footwear, where he had both a front-row seat and played an active role in what he calls “a renaissance in design.” This renaissance had its share of masterpieces, most of them built on a bubble of nothing. Well, not nothing: Nike had introduced “air” technology to running shoes in the late ’70s, and in 1982, the Air Force 1 became the first basketball shoe to carry the gas-filled polyurethane pouches that evolved into the company’s signature support innovation. Initially, T H E M AG A Z I N E O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F O R E G O N

those pouches had been hidden, felt but unseen by the wearer (or anyone else). That changed in 1987 with the Air Max 1, a Hatfield-designed running shoe with an “air-sole unit” visible in the midsole. Hatfield, who worked as an architect before joining Nike in 1981, cited as his inspiration the Pompidou Centre in Paris, famed for its skeletal, inside-out design. That same year, Nike released the Air Trainer, the hybrid whose impact Hatfield had pondered on that flight back from Tokyo. Sensing the consumer appeal of its new “visible air” technology, Nike spent a reported $500,000 on the commercial rights to the Beatles song “Revolution,” placing the song in a TV spot featuring Jordan, tennis star John McEnroe, and lots of anonymous athletes doing athletic things with Nike Air on their feet. The choice of song hinted at the sense of overthrowing the status quo represented in the shoe’s design; the choice of band guaranteed consumers would pay attention. “The ‘Revolution’ ad was huge,” says Reames. “You’ve got the Beatles essentially supporting the visible air platform” (although not for long: lawyers for the Beatles, who no longer owned the rights but didn’t want the song to be featured in advertising, sued Nike, which discontinued the ads the following year). Adds Hatfield, “At the time, we didn’t really look at shoes through the lens of anything other than its benefits to a specific sport or athlete. The impact of that shoe showed me the true influence of the design on culture.” It was only a start. Hatfield took a lead role in designing Jordan’s signature line, beginning a run that would make the designer, at least among an emerging community of obsessives known as “sneaker heads,” nearly as famous as

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ABOVE AND BOTTOM RIGHT: THESE SKETCHES ILLUSTRATE THE DESIGN PROCESS FOR THE AIR JORDAN XVII, CIRCA 2002.

Jordan himself. His first was the Air Jordan III, of which Hatfield says, “Going in, I really was conscious of the impact that the design could have. I was thinking, now I get it: As I’m trying to solve problems for an athlete, there is a cultural component here that I need to incorporate. I realized there was this great potential: to serve the athlete, but also jump over the railing into modern culture.” The Jordan III saw the first application of visible air to the Jordan line, and the debut of the “Jumpman” silhouette that became Jordan’s personal logo and hinted at Jordan Brand’s eventual growth into its own company under the Nike umbrella. Later designs, chosen as always through close consultation with Jordan himself, found inspiration in everything from fighter jets to Ferraris. (Worth noting: Not long after the Jordan III came out, Hatfield designed the self-lacing shoes worn by Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future II; versions of the Nike Air Mag were auctioned off for charity in 2011.) Along the way, Jordan evolved from exciting young player to the best on the planet, and a pop-culture icon in his own right. In that, he paralleled what Smith calls “the marriage of performance and personality” that in many ways came to define Nike’s approach. And there was no lack of personalities: Bo Jackson, the two-sport dynamo who personified the idea of cross-training, starred in the “Bo Knows” campaign that promoted the next generation of the Air Trainer. Charles Barkley and Andre Agassi arrived in the ’90s, each with a signature shoe and marketing campaigns built around their reputation as sporting and cultural renegades. Smith, who has designed shoes with and for Agassi and later Serena Williams, describes a trait shared by the

tennis stars: “Irreverence justified.” Of working with Agassi, whose punk-rock mullet and fluorescent tennis gear challenged the sport’s orthodoxy, Smith says, “We were waking up the country club. That changed tennis forever.” It’s a strain of rebellion that runs deep at Nike, a company that still draws inspiration from Steve Prefontaine’s legacy of, as Smith puts it, “breaking through with attitude as well as performance.” “ P r e ” m i g h t n e v e r h av e sketched or built a sneaker, but given the company’s roots in the Ducks’ track-and-field program, the mentality he personified has unsurprisingly had a lasting influence on design as well. Hatfield, a standout competitor for Bowerman’s program during his undergraduate days, says, “The push to get better, and do better, is part of what makes Nike special. That was born at Hayward Field with Bill Bowerman and continues today. There is always an opportunity to make something better.” Adds Reames, the historian, “We’re a competitive group, not only with other brands, but within our own company. We have a phrase, ‘There is no finish line,’ and I would say that’s more our mantra than ‘Just do it.’” As such, it’s not difficult to draw a line from Bowerman’s ingenious use of his wife’s waffle iron to create a new running sole to the buzzing hives of envelope-pushing in Beaverton today. At the Sport Research Lab, a team of dozens of scientists and engineers study biomechanics, physiology, sensory perception, and data science, essentially lifting sneaker design to the heights of rocket science; at the Innovation Kitchen, led by Hatfield, designers work with tools, materials, and data that Bowerman could never have imagined, forever looking for the next step forward. The latest steps include Flyknit, the ultralight, precision-fit technology that Time named one of the year’s best inventions in 2012; and the HyperAdapt 1.0, announced in March and due for a late 2016 release, that promises to make the Back to the Future fantasy of push-button lacing a reality. There is no finish line. If that’s the mantra that has inspired so much stylistic, technological, and

ABOVE: WILSON SMITH, BA rch ’80, SHOWN HERE IN A NIKE DESIGN STUDIO CIRCA 1993, IS THE CREATIVE FORCE BEHIND THE AIR JORDAN XVII.

cultural trailblazing, it makes sense that it also keeps Hatfield and his colleagues from dwelling on the ground they’ve broken. Of seeing his and other Nike designs in that Brooklyn Museum show last year, Hatfield says, “I’m a bit indifferent about it. I try not to look back. I think that’s why I’m still designing.” No doubt, his coach would be proud to hear it. Ryan Jones, a former editor at SLAM magazine, is deputy editor of The Penn Stater.

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Smith Ro ck

o nt H Mou

Newber ry

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Crater

Nadja Quiroz, a graduate student in landscape architecture, utilized Redmond’s nickname as “The Hub” of Central Oregon as design inspiration for her landscape master plan for the Redmond Airport. Locally sourced basalt is used to create landforms that are centered on the intersection of the runways.

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E G N A H C F O B U H THE UO

IS IATIVE T I N I S E E CITI AINABL T S U S ’S

P STATE TO HEL E H T S S O R C A DERS ING WITH LEA COLLABORAT

CITIES BECOME GREENER AND MORE LIVABLE. SCYP STUDENT MISSION

BY MAR Y

D E M OC

GOAL Better communication between city leadership and residents, especially young ones

KE R

edmond police chief Dave Tarbet appraised the group of young people, unsure where things were headed. A dozen UO architecture students had just disembarked from a chartered bus for their first meeting with Tarbet, his police department, and Redmond city staff and councilors. The students’ task was to render architectural plans for a new police station in a vacated national armory building—and design it sustainably. Most of them had no familiarity with Redmond or police facilities and hadn’t worked with flesh-and-blood architecture clients, much less a uniformed squadron. The police chief, not usually involved with design or students, wasn’t sure what to expect either, but he and his department were game for taking part in the Sustainable City Year Program (SCYP). Other officials who had interacted with some of the 28 UO classes unleashed on Redmond had delighted in the presence of students eager to tackle the city’s sustainability issues. In a reversal of the usual youths-and-cops scenario, students questioned police. “What can you tell us about your police station? How do you organize the physical elements? What do you think about when you think about Redmond?” The officers’ concerns—pragmatic ones about where to store evidence or put the intake counter—shifted to reflections on what it’s like to work

in law enforcement, how that influences social interactions, and what kind of long-term identity they envisioned for their department. The police chief and many of the officers and staff members at the meeting left that first encounter impressed with the students and eager to see what kind of station they’d design. “What was exciting,” says Lieutenant Mike Kidwell, “was that they actually asked us what we wanted.”

Students said, “Tweet! Use mobile apps, more social media, lots of videos and photos. Use Facebook conversationally. Hold city council meetings at a high school. Set up a booth at the farmer’s market.”

THAT’S THE POINT, according to Marc Schlossberg, codirector of the Sustainable Cities Initiative (SCI), the UO organization that runs SCYP. He notes that there’s a long history of universities researching communities and extracting knowledge from them, but such research doesn’t necessarily benefit its subjects. “Students get brownie points, faculty members get brownie points, and the community is left with nothing.” Instead, as it has done every year since its inception in 2009, SCYP asks cities to identify existing problems they’d like help with as well as dream projects that the staff and leadership need help bringing to fruition. For the 2015–16 partnership year, SCYP program manager Megan Banks took Redmond’s wish list and played matchmaker, finding UO professors to gear classes toward each particular project. In the end, more than 400 students from eight academic departments gave 50,000 hours to a wide T H E M AG A Z I N E O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F O R E G O N

SCYP STUDENT MISSION

GOAL Redesign Highway SW 97/commercial corridor into a multi-way boulevard  Students’ final presentations impressed a private, milliondollar consultant team, which then changed its approach to the project and requested the students’ proposals to inform its work.

SCYP STUDENT MISSION

GOAL Familyfriendly biking, especially to and from schools Students suggested creating “walking school buses” and “bicycle trains.”

range of projects, including a redesign of a highway corridor, a feasibility study for a community art center, outreach to the growing Latino community, and a “Walk, Bike, Roll” marketing campaign. Other student recommendations may lead one day to a new police station that features a courtyard for shared lunches and community barbeques, and even a public café, store, library, classroom, or fitness room. “The courtyard was one of many ideas exploring the concept that the police station building could actually be a catalyst for change in the community and even have a strong role in the daily urban fabric,” said Eugene architect Joseph Moore, BArch ’07, who taught SCI’s Redmond-project architecture class.

THE PIONEERING COLLABORATIVE MODEL, according to Schlossberg, benefits everyone involved. “Students get value out of doing real-world projects and the faculty gets value because students are totally motivated and doing better work,” he says. Cities get expert attention from professors, often leaders in their fields, who help hundreds of young minds churn over countless issues and create proposals to solve them. Cities pay $300,000–350,000 to participate in the program—after vying against other cities for the yearlong partnership—and say it’s worth every penny. Heather Richards, Redmond’s community development director, says it’s been refreshing to watch student innovation move projects forward that had been stagnant for years. “Most of us, especially in management levels, have

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been in the industry awhile and we get a bit jaded and put into a box. It’s been energizing to have young people challenge that box, not only for us, but for city leadership and the community.” Students love it, too. Fifth-year architecture student Dianna Montzka went to the first class of her bicycle transportation course not knowing it was run through SCYP. Though she’d had many classes in architecture and city planning, this class, for which Professor Schlossberg won a UO Sustainability Award, was, “from the get-go, 10 times better than any experience I’d had. At our first meeting with Redmond, it was clear they were impressed with the knowledge we already had about their city and taken aback at our level of commitment.” Montzka recalls that Richards invited the class to think big and share freely. “She told us, ‘We want to hear anything and everything you have. This is up to you guys, really.’” The students dove into research and, over the next 10 weeks, sketched, Skyped, scanned, and e-mailed with city staffers as they tinkered with ways to make Redmond’s bicycling infrastructure more safe, accessible, and family-friendly. “I put much more energy into my work because I was making a difference in the real world,” Montzka says. “I was getting feedback from actual people in the city who care about this info and want to implement it, rather than having a hypothetical client who never gave me feedback.” Inspired to literally go the extra mile, Montzka even traveled back to Redmond with three classmates to learn more about its biking culture, interviewing cyclists in cafés and in front of stores.

Left to right: Adell Amos, associate professor in environmental and natural resources law; SCI codirector Marc Schlossberg, professor of planning, public policy and management; SCI codirector Nico Larco, associate professor of architecture; and Heather Brinton, director, Environmental and Natural Resources Law Center.

PHOTOGRAPH BY MICHAEL MCDERMOTT

SCYP STUDENT MISSION

GOAL Affordable housing  Student recommendations for how to better incentivize affordable housing are now being researched.

”Being taken seriously made the work I did much easier to accomplish,” she says. “It wasn’t, ‘Ugh, I have to finish this assignment,’ but ‘Oh! I want to finish my rendering to change this sad street to an awesome street that’s going to work so well for them!’” It doesn’t hurt the résumé, either. Classmate Kylie Kopczenski chatted about her bike transportation course with her seatmate on an airplane, unaware that he was a top executive with PFL Spaces, which designs and builds bicycle parking facilities for commercial buildings. “I didn’t think I would have much to put on a résumé,” she says, “but my experience working with Redmond added a tremendous boost. I was able to turn the encounter into an awesome job.”

SCI BEGAN THE WAY many great ideas do—with a gripe session. Schlossberg and four colleagues, all passionate about a multidisciplinary approach to sustainability, discovered a shared and acute frustration: The climate crisis was driving an urgency for improvements in energy efficiency and livability in urban design, but prospects for on-the-ground change were shrinking with city budgets. Meanwhile, hundreds of UO students were generating innovations in sustainable design that no one but a handful of professors ever saw. “We have students turning in insightful papers over and over and over again,” Schlossberg says. “Most of the analysis and ideas are a nice compromise between being ambitious and smartly realistic in a way I never was at that age.” PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF JEFF KRUEGER

But once students hand in those final projects, they generally hurry on to the next class, he says. “Ninety-eight percent don’t even want feedback. Every professor at every university around the world sees this capacity, talent, and effort being wasted.” What if, the professors wondered, classes work on projects that cities actually want help with? They pitched Gresham’s city manager, Erik Kvarsten, BS SCYP STUDENT MISSION ’82, proposing that each would gear GOAL More one class toward a sustainability Walk, Bike, Roll problem in Gresham. The students participation  would try to solve the problem, and Students surveyed the city would give them profesthe community, sional feedback on their proposals. designed The professors described city planning and marketing and social media tools, design projects they typically work on in their and proposed UO classes and asked, “Does any of this stuff ways to use them look useful?” for community “Much to our surprise,” Schlossberg said, outreach. “Kvarsten and city staffers went down our list and said, ‘We could use help with everything on your list, and here are 10 or 20 more things—do you do that at the UO?’” Schlossberg and associate professor of architecture Nico Larco matched the projects with UO professors and in 2009, launched the Sustainable Cities Initiative (SCI), which they now codirect. “Right from the start, it was like drinking from a fire hose,” says Larco.

Graduate student in landscape architecture Kelly Stoecklein (kneeling) points out features of her plan for a commercial area in Redmond, with (clockwise, from left) undergraduate Casey Howard, graduate student Matthew Jorgensen, ODOT’s Joel McCarroll, and graduate student Krisztian Megyeri.

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’T IS, ‘DON L L A R E YS OV AKEAWA T T S E G MY BIG “ONE OF NT GOT RIGHT NOW, DO VE U’ YO T HA W H IT BE SATISFIED W

“Some people call it the three E’s—economy, environment, and equity. They’re like three overlapping circles; if you work in that middle space, GET COMPLACENT.’” —CITY MANAGER KEITH WITCOSKY touching all three things, that’s sustainability.” Taking that to heart, city leaders in five of the seven SCYP partnerships have requested SCYP STUDENT MISSION That first year, students in 19 classes dug into help communicating with their growing Latino population. Lowmultiple projects in Gresham, including a design income Latinos in Oregon typically shun traditional public engagement GOAL Homeless shelter for a new city hall, redevelopment for a low-in- processes due to language barriers, the difficulty of attending town hall come neighborhood, and beautification of a light- meetings, and, for undocumented community Students proSCYP STUDENT MISSION posed ways for a rail station. Students offered so many creative and members, fear. Because decision-makers lack GOAL Study homeless servicespragmatic solutions that, even in the recession in-depth understanding of Latino issues, they feasibility of provider coalition economy, Gresham decided to pay. “The quality struggle to create effective policy. funding a new to raise funds and family recreational of the deliverables justified it,” says Kvarsten. In Redmond, Sandoval partnered with launch and govern center the program. When more cities clamored to be “the next the Mexican consulate and a Latino support Students’ tax levy Gresham,” SCI instituted an application process organization headed by UO alumnus Brad research is being and fee, and hired a full-time program manager. “To me, the power of this Porterfield, MCRP ’01, to conduct outreach studied at Parks is that we didn’t reinvent the wheel at all,” says Schlossberg. “We just har- where Latinos feel safe—at churches, schools, and Recreation nessed what already exists in universities and within our partner cities and and Latino-owned businesses. board retreats. stumbled on a way to squeeze efficiencies out of them. If you think about Student research has found that undocuanything around sustainability, that’s where it’s at.” mented Latinos often feel unsafe in public parks and that low-income Latinos News about SCYP’s success spread, and Springfield and Medford fol- often experience discrimination while they seek housing. One Mexican lowed after Salem. After the New York Times highlighted SCI as “perhaps the teen built a diorama of a soccer field to convey his longing for more access. most comprehensive effort by a US university to infuse sustainability into its Students report findings to city officials, who can use them to inform public curricula and community outreach,” and the Chronicle of Higher Education policy decisions that affect marginalized Latino communities. praised it as “one of higher education’s most successful and comprehensive In Medford, research highlighted the paucity of Latinos holding elecservice-learning programs,” other universities came calling, wanting to tive office. A person acting as a cultural liaison for the UO group later start their own programs. Larco and Schlossberg were eager to share the won a seat on the local school board. “One of my goals is to create a buzz program’s successes, and in 2011, SCI hosted its first replication conference. around these themes, and empower Latinos to run for office or start their “Now, 25 programs around the country are running the SCYP model own businesses,” notes Sandoval. or some version of it,” Larco says, “everything from small liberal arts colleges to large research-oriented universities.” The program has garnered THE UO SUPPORTED the growth of SCI in 2011 with a $50,000 several awards, including one from the Association for the Advancement Big Ideas grant. “The university was primed for this kind of work,” of Sustainability in Higher Education. It also has a growing international notes Larco. “I don’t think I’ve found anywhere else that has the depth component, with faculty members providing training to colof people interested in sustainability that we’ve got here. SCYP STUDENT MISSION leagues in Israel, Gabon, and China. This is where the UO can actually be a leader nationally GOAL Design a Larco has several theories about why SCI is so successful. and internationally.” new police station “We’re very entrepreneurial. We think of SCI as a startup, Schlossberg agrees that the UO has the potential to be a in old armory so we’re nimble and result-oriented. Instead of trying to world leader in integrating research, education, and commuStudents recmake things perfect before we go or thinking about somenity change. “We do it for more disciplines than anywhere ommended that the building play thing to death—which, as academics, we tend to do a lot—we else on the planet, and in a more effective way. This is the a broad role in say, ‘Just start’ and make it better as we go.” niche the UO can be exploiting to make its mark. We don’t the life of the do nearly as much as we should to own this space.” community by incorporating a ANOTHER PART OF SCYP’s genius is that participants get SCI also hopes to expand its partnership with the state of courtyard, public to approach problems from a multidisciplinary perspective, Oregon. “Right now, the entirety of the SCYP funding comes café, library, and incorporating the full range and complexity of modern urban from cities,” Schlossberg says. “We’d ideally like the cities to classrooms into design issues. Students also get experience with a lesser-known put in half and have it be matched by the state. It would be the design. but vital aspect of sustainable design and planning: social jusan amazing leverage of city-state-university—all working on tice. “When people think of sustainability, they think of the environment, pressing societal issues and training the next generation’s workforce, serving but part of sustainability is the equity component,” says Gerardo Sandoval, Oregon. Those are the conversations we’re trying to have with the governor.” an assistant professor in the Department of Planning, Public Policy and “We’re putting the public back in public universities,” Larco says. Management. “For me, equity means making institutional amends for historical oppression, so it includes issues of race and inequality. Mary DeMocker, BA ’92, is a freelance writer in Eugene.

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50 Power of Attorney 52 The Picture of Health 54 Class Notes 64 Toothy Wonder

Oregon OLD

Take the Tube

Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s a sure sign of summer in Eugene when students grab inner tubes and head for the nearest river bank. This photo dates to 1976, but the practice is timeless. Nowadays students can even take the #91 bus to their favorite launch points along the McKenzie. Happy tubing, everyone.

PHOTOGRAPH: 1976 OREGANA

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Old Oregon

ALUMNI

Madeline Bailey at Clark Honors College last January.

Power of Attorney

A Clark Honors College grad, now a third-year law student, is already using her considerable legal skills to advocate for prisoners. adeline Bailey, BA student, I was able to help her underBY JONATHAN GRAHAM ’11, will never forstand what the parole board wanted get the way her client’s face lit up when to see from her. The board is very focused on making sure the verdict was read. The woman was that a person has insight into what they have done, but 22 years into a life sentence and had no one had ever spent the time to talk with her about that been denied parole seven times. before.” “She never had a good advocate, Bailey was able to spend considerable time with the never had an attorney sit down and client, helping her prepare for a hearing that eventually spend a significant amount of time set her free. “It was amazing to see her have hope again,” with her since she began her sen- she says. tence,” says Bailey, valedictorian of the And when the woman was eventually released from a University of Oregon’s Robert D. Clark Honors College prison in California’s Central Valley, Bailey and a classin 2011 and now a third-year law student at University of mate were there to pick her up and drive her to transitional California at Berkeley. “Along with another Berkeley law housing in the Los Angeles area.

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PHOTOGRAPH BY CHARLIE LITCHFIELD

After graduating from the UO, Bailey worked for the Prison Law Office, a Berkeleybased nonprofit that litigated Brown v. Plata, the 2011 case in which the US Supreme Court ruled that the level of prison overcrowding in California at the time was unconstitutional. Bailey worked for the organization for two years prior to entering law school, visiting prisons with attorneys to see whether conditions were in compliance with the law. That experience inspired her interest in prisoners’ rights and postconviction advocacy. Since starting law school at Berkeley, she has worked with an Oakland-based nonprofit called UnCommon Law to help two individuals serving life sentences gain parole. (In addition to the woman described previously, Bailey served as an advocate for a man who had been sentenced to life at age 17. Upon his release, Bailey was able to see him reunited with his family.) She has also worked for the ACLU National Prison Project in Washington, DC, and several public defender offices across the country. Bailey traces her interest in criminal justice reform to her time at the UO. As a participant in the university’s Inside-Out Prison Exchange program, which holds classes inside the Oregon State Penitentiary, she took Professor Steven Shankman’s course “Literature and Ethics.” She says it was an honor to get to know her incarcerated classmates in that particular class, and in the classes she continued to take through the program. “I’d never been in a class before where it was guaranteed that everyone would have done the reading,” she recalls. “Everyone came ready to engage with the material. It was really an example of what education should be.” Bailey says the class had great discussions of Cervantes, Dostoevsky, and Emmanuel Levinas, but they also learned one another’s personal stories, which made her think critically about the criminal justice system and begin to develop her own career goals. She was later an intern with the Inside-Out program, assisting with courses held at the prison and helping run a reading group at the juvenile justice center in Eugene. “I don’t think locking people away is ever the answer,” she says. “Our society tends to ignore the reality that there are very few exceptional cases where people should be separated from the community. Most of the people in prison should not be there, and those

who are there have been failed by the system over and over again.” She believes that the criminal justice system is simply broken. “People of color face incredible odds as a result of decades of racist public policy. As a society, we need to acknowledge the horrible things that have happened in the past, apologize for them, and recognize how they impact people today.” Bailey has accepted a legal fellowship at the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) in Montgomery, Alabama, where she will begin work following graduation in May. The organization, a national leader in addressing such issues as the death penalty and juvenile incarceration, is also involved in public education around the connections between race and the justice sys-

Most of the people in prison should not be there, and those who are there have been failed by the system over and over again.

Get Your Duck On! The UO Alumni Association is sponsoring these regional events this summer. For detailed information, visit: uoalumni.com/events e-mail: alumni@uoregon.edu call: 800-245-ALUM From Paris to Bend, there are a variety of upcoming events that are designed to gather the flock and celebrate our wonderful university. Here are some highlights: June 2 NATIONAL PARKS TOUR Various locations June 12 DESERT DUCKS GOLF SCRAMBLE Scottsdale, Arizona June 14 OREGON FOLKLIFE Bend

tem. “Madeline has been able to put together a coherent constellation of experiences,” says geography professor Shaul Cohen, director of UO’s Inside-Out program and Bailey’s thesis advisor at the Clark Honors College. Bailey also assisted Cohen with his research on the conflict in Northern Ireland. He notes that her impressive accomplishments as an undergraduate and in her first few years out of college suggest that she has many great things in store. “She’ll be able to choose how she wants to make a contribution,” he says. “The chance to do this sort of work is exactly why I wanted to go to law school,” says Bailey. “Many of my classmates are on a different path, toward careers in corporate law. Success for me looks different. I’ve put a lot of my energy into practical experiences and into learning how to be an advocate. For me, that’s what it’s all about.”

June 15 PARIS IMMERSION Paris, France August 13 OREGON FOLKLIFE Bend Learn more at uoalumni.com

Jonathan Graham is editor of this magazine. T H E M AG A Z I N E O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F O R E G O N

Old Oregon

ALUMNI

The Picture of Health

The urgent need for better health care in rural communities drew UO business school grads Oliver Alexander, BS ’14, and Orion Falvey, BS ’13, to the little town of Oakridge, Oregon.

aped on the wall of the the privilege of using the school’s public BY JOHN STRIEDER break room of Orchid bathroom instead of the one in the office. Health, a clinic in Oakridge, Oregon, is a Grief is part of life, often managed with only a lithandwritten thank-you letter that describes tle help. But even a little help can be hard to come by the progress of an elementary-school boy. in Oakridge. The town, population 3,200, is mounA behavioral health specialist at Orchid tain-locked and 45 minutes from Eugene, the nearest city had treated the boy once a week for almost of any size. Without Orchid, there would have been no eight months. “He was disruptive in class,” one in Oakridge to help the boy, Dale says. He and a parsays the clinic’s office manager, Jenny Dale. ent would have had to make a half-day trek to Eugene “I believe his father had passed away, and he once a week for months, missing work and school—and was just acting out.” that’s assuming they had a car. The bus takes even longer. Since then, his participation in class has drastically Orchid Health has made an enormous difference to the improved, according to the letter, though he still sometimes people of Oakridge since it opened in August 2014. Unlike needs prompting to do schoolwork. And he had earned back the other doctor in town, the new clinic takes any and all

O R E G O N Q U A R T E R LY

SUMMER 2016

PHOTOGRAPH BY DUSTIN WHITAKER

Medicaid patients. “We will take you as long as you have one of the insurances that we’re currently accepting,” Dale says. “And if you don’t have insurance, we’ll help you find insurance.” Orchid had about 1,000 patients on the rolls when Dale started working there in mid-2015, and it welcomes one to two new patients a day. The facility has tapped into a demand. But the little clinic in the woods also owes its health to a savvy business plan put together by its founders, two Oregon business school graduates who are still in their mid-20s.

TWO GUYS AND A DREAM Just three years ago, Oliver Alexander was a business student at the University of Oregon’s Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship, weighing entrepreneurship against finance. Orion Falvey, his classmate, had just returned from an international development internship in Cambodia. “I never thought I’d get involved in health care,” Falvey admits. But when they decided to pair up for the Oregon Social Business Challenge, they turned to Ronald Severson, their instructor in a social entrepreneurship class, for direction. “He was, like, ‘Go for something big if you’re going to do it,’” Alexander remembers. They went huge—attacking the rural healthcare crisis. “There’s a 30 percent chance you’re smoking while pregnant in Oakridge,” Alexander says. “The alcohol-induced death rate is 2.6 times the state average. There’s lots of substance abuse, lots of hypertension. The normal things that happen when people don’t exercise well, don’t eat well, and are in low-income situations— that’s what we deal with every day.” After Alexander, 25, and Falvey, 24, took second place at the challenge, they continued to develop their concept and put it in front of medical and finance professionals. One advisor was UO assistant professor of finance Stephen McKeon, who was introduced to the Orchid concept at a startup-incubator event. Ultimately, he invested in the company. So did Lorne Bigley, a doctor and IT specialist for medical giant PeaceHealth. “I believed that Oliver and Orion were exceptionally motivated and capable entrepreneurs,” McKeon says. “Everything I’ve observed since then has reinforced this assessment. I was also attracted by the business model. Not only does it make financial sense, but the expansion of rural health-care services genuinely improves

quality of life in those communities, so it’s a great example of impact investing.”

Orchid plans to start accepting more Medicare and private insurance patients by summer.

ORCHID IN BLOOM

MAYBE IT WAS ALWAYS PERSONAL

To open their first clinic. Alexander and Falvey raised more than $240,000, including $70,000 from Lane County’s business incentive program for equipment and a loan from the city of Oakridge to refurbish a long-vacant medical office. Now, they’re expanding. They opened with one part-time doctor, a nurse, a nurse practitioner, and one mental-health therapist, and have since added two more mental-health therapists and a physician’s assistant. And their plan to establish a chain of Orchid clinics kicks off in August, when they expect to open their second clinic in Estacada, southeast of Portland.

The evolution of Orchid’s business model is crucial in helping it stay ahead of the unique problems faced by rural medical care providers. “Medicare payments to rural hospitals and physicians are dramatically less than those to their urban counterparts for equivalent services,” notes the National Rural Health Association on its website. “This correlates closely with the fact that more than 470 rural hospitals have closed in the past 25 years.” The transition from student project to successful business also came with its own learning curve. “We had a really good business model going into it,” Alexander says. “But we had no HR experience. We had no management experience. We had no experience training people.” On the other hand, he says, recruiting is one of their core competencies. It has to be, for them to attract medical professionals. The pay is competitive with larger markets, he says, and unlike many clinics that expect their providers to see 20 to 30 patients per day, they set a limit of 14 for each provider. This entrepreneurial challenge is perhaps a bit personal for them, too. Falvey grew up in the isolated panhandle town of Haines, Alaska (population: about 2,500). When his teenage sister found a lump in her chest, her small-town doctors weren’t able to properly diagnose it for months. “They actually thought it was a rib out of place. We went to a chiropractor who pushed on it, thinking it was a rib.” The lump was not a rib. It was a tumor. She had Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Today, she’s cancer-free and working as an emergency room nurse in a small hospital in Juneau. “It’s been great to bounce ideas off each other,” Falvey says. With his childhood as a backdrop, Falvey is beginning to envision health-care concepts tailored to the culture of small towns. He imagines developing rural clinics that allow patients to take their own blood pressure and access other resources without booking a formal visit. “In rural communities, there’s this stigma on going in to see a health-care provider,” he says. “People are not going to see a doctor until it’s really bad. That’s something we’re really trying to work on changing.”

State data shows more than 20 rural communities in Oregon with demand that supports the Orchid business model.

Orchid Health hopes to do for Estacada what it’s done in Oakridge. In fact, state data shows more than 20 rural communities in Oregon with demand that supports the Orchid business model. Orchid aims to meet that demand while staying profitable. A big part of their plan is stateof-the-art information technology. Electronic health records are not only more efficient, but they allow the team to plot and track preventative measures by, for example, tracking the percentage of patients who regularly use tobacco. When Orchid opened, it tried to promote preventive care by selling monthly memberships with unlimited doctor visits. But the newly minted Affordable Care Act made the membership plan redundant. Their main funding source became Medicaid, the federal-state assistance program for people with low incomes. Alexander says Medicaid pays out more to rural health clinics than Medicare, the federal insurance program used mainly by the elderly and people with disabilities. Still,

John Strieder, a writer and video producer, is a master’s degree student in multimedia journalism.

T H E M AG A Z I N E O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F O R E G O N

Old Oregon

CLASS NOTES

Class Notes 1940s

INDICATES UOAA MEMBER

Do you ever wish we printed more notes from your class? Your classmates feel that way, too. Submit a note online at OregonQuarterly.com or mail it to Editor, Oregon Quarterly, 5228 University of Oregon, Eugene OR 97403-5228.

he established in 1976.

DONALD JOE WILLIS,

He is also an enthusias-

BS ’69, JD ’71, was honored

tic American Institute of

by the Owners Counsel of

Architects fellow.

America with the 2016 Crystal Eagle Award for more

RAY ABST, BS ’49, BArch

TED TAYLOR, BS ’67,

than 40 years spent pro-

’50, and his wife, Shirley,

has retired after nearly 18

viding counsel to property

recently moved to Sonoma,

years as editor of Eugene

owners in land use, con-

California, to join their

Weekly. Previously, he was

demnation, and regulatory

daughter, CAROLYN

a reporter, news editor,

takings litigation in Oregon

ABST, MArch ’80, and her

and managing editor of

and throughout the US.

husband, Ron, who are

the Ashland Daily Tidings.

both enjoying recent retire-

He has two book projects

Attorney FRANK

ment from their San Fran-

in the works, and plans to

LANGFITT, JD ’73, joined

cisco architecture firm.

continue his writing and

the litigation team of the

photography.

Portland law firm Miller,

1960s

Nash, Graham & Dunn as

Before becoming an

1970s

entrepreneur, CARL

DELMAR HOOD, MA

announced in January that

FINWALL , BA ’65, was

’70, wrote History in the

DAVID M. HUDSON, BS

an adventurer. His mem-

Headlines: Half a Century

’74, will serve as the com-

oir, titled My Ten-Year

of the Most Notable Events

pany’s interim president

Journey: Witty, Wise, and

in El Cajon Valley and Sur-

and CEO.

Utterly Fascinating Stories:

rounding Areas, 1950–2000

A Decade of Adventures and

(Sunbelt, 2016), chron-

PATTY DANN, BA ’75, has

Healing (Amazon, 2016),

icling more than 1,700

a new book coming out

takes readers through his

headline stories from local

in August, The Butterfly

student years during the

papers.

Hours: Transforming Mem-

1960s to his time living

The Search Continues eattle lawyer, world traveler, and amateur Indiana Jones Blaine Gibson, BA ’79, has spent much of the past year traveling around the Indian Ocean, searching for traces of Malaysia Airlines flight 370, which went missing on March 8, 2014. He recently recovered what could be a piece of the plane’s tail section. According to CNN, Gibson’s hunt has taken him from Mozambique to the Maldives to Mauritius and Myanmar where he has interviewed witnesses who believe they saw the plane flying low. Blaine also spent time on remote islands, searching for additional evidence of the missing plane. He is keeping a blog about his search at thehuntformh370.info.

O R E G O N Q U A R T E R LY

SUMMER 2016

a senior counsel. Schmitt Industries Inc.

ories into Memoir (Sham-

with Navajo Indians and

After serving as CEO

throughout Europe, North

of Albertina Kerr for 26

bhala, 2016).

Africa, and Japan.

years, CHRISTOPHER

After 20 years working

KRENK , BS ’71, will retire

as a technical writer for

After 40 years in the

in June. He is proud to

companies including Wall

architecture industry,

have helped launch the

Delta, NetManage, and

CHARLES BETTIS-

campaign that will build

Microsoft, JOEL DAVIS,

WORTH , BArch ’67,

a 10-acre campus dedi-

MLS ’76, has “retired,” but

flunked out of the

cated to children’s mental

continues to enjoy free-

retirement game and

health, capable of serving

lancing. He is currently

has returned to mentor

more than 1,000 families

finishing an article for

employees at the firm

every year.

Astronomy magazine.

F L A S H BAC K

1976

The University of Oregon prepares to host the eight-day US Olympic Track and Field Trials for both men and women. More than 150,000 visitors are expected to witness the high-caliber competition. Eugene is the first city to hold back-to-back track and field trials, and combining the men’s and women’s competitions is another first. PHOTOGRAPH: AP IMAGES

F L A S H BAC K

1986

Old Oregon reports on a resurgence of interest in Greek Life after a long spell of decline. Sorority pledges are up by 55 percent from two years earlier, and fraternities by 44 percent. According to a recent poll, nearly 40 percent of students see themselves as conservative, as compared with only a quarter who term themselves liberal. Students’ conservatism, traditionalism, and job worries are all feeding the Greek system. The Old Oregon headline: “Why go Greek? Fun, friendship, tradition, a good resume, and a high-status mate.”

1980s BRUCE CAMPBELL, BS

(Glencannon Press, 2016), which National Geographic praised as “festive adventures, soulful and sincere.”

’80, a partner of the law firm Miller, Nash, Graham

A long-time resident of

& Dunn, was selected as

Indianapolis, Indiana,

an American Academy of

MARCI TAYLOR, BA ’80,

Appellate Lawyers fellow

has served nine years as a

in March.

principal system analyst

DUCKS AFIELD

Emerald Isle Chic Decked out in her functional and fashionable Duck poncho,

MARJORIE HARRIS, BS ’55, braves the wind and rain in Dingle, Ireland—not unfamiliar conditions for a member of the flock. We love to track Duck migrations! Send us your favorite photos of yourself, classmates, family, and friends showing your Duck pride around the world. Attach high resolution JPEG or TIFF files to an email and send to quarterly@uoregon.edu, or submit them online at OregonQuarterly.com.

with Liberty Mutual InsurJOSEPH WAHL, BA ’80,

ance. She and her husband,

Interactive Media: Free for

recognition as coauthor

SEAN (SMITH)

interim CFO and secretary

assistant director for Port-

Jack, are excited to soon see

a Fee (Peter Lang Publish-

of Under Attack: How to

MCGOWAN, BA ’89, is a life

for BioLife Solutions Inc.

land’s Office of Equity and

their son off to college.

ers, 2015) and Case Analy-

Protect Your Business and

member of the Professional

ses for Intellectual Property

Bank Account from Fast-

Golfers Association of

BRIAN CAVANAUGH,

chair of Partners in Diver-

WILL BADRICK, BArch

Law and New Media (Peter

Growing, Ultramotivated,

America, and recently relo-

BArch ’95, became presi-

sity, is married to LORA

’83, published the e-novel

Lang Publishers, 2015).

and Highly Dangerous

cated to Sarasota, Florida,

dent-elect of the American

OSAKI. They are the

Epic [Life] (Smashwords,

Cybercrime Rings

where he works in sales for

Institute of Architecture’s

proud parents of two more

2016), a tale set in the

Cupertino, California’s

(Celebrity Press, 2016),

GPS Industries, a company

Portland chapter and is

Ducks, RYAN, BS ’07, and

Big Apple that explores

first poet laureate DAVID

which topped five

that delivers global posi-

president of Portland’s

KELSEY, BS ’12.

multiple dimensions of

DENNY, MFA ’86, recently

Amazon bestseller lists on

tioning system products to

Center for Architecture

time and space.

published a book of short

the first day of its release.

the golf industry.

Board of Directors.

Human Rights and vice

Emmy Award–win-

stories titled The Gill Man

managing director, the

1990s

MATTHEW KATZER,

highest corporate rank at

RODERICK DE GREEF,

DAVID J. CHARD, PhD

MBA ’89, recently earned

DBS Bank in Singapore.

MBA ’93, will step in as

’95, will officially become

ning filmmaker KEVIN

EDWARD LEE LAMOU-

in Purgatory (Shanti Arts,

KUM THONG MOK,

MCCAREY, MA ’80, pub-

REUX, PhD ’85, published

2015).

BS ’89, was promoted to

lished his second book,

two books last year, the

Oceans Apart: The Wan-

second edition of Intel-

derings of a Young Mariner

lectual Property Law and

The current dean of Southern Methodist University’s School of Education,

T H E M AG A Z I N E O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F O R E G O N

Old Oregon

CLASS NOTES

the 14th president of

layered flavors of passion

Wheelock College in July.

fruit, pink grapefruit, and apricot.

BRIAN STEINBURG,

architecture firm Weber

2000s

Thompson. He special-

After a one-year stint as

izes in high-rise design,

interim principal of

and has focused his efforts

Ashland High School, the

on reshaping Seattle’s

job grew on ERIKA BARE,

waterfront for more than

BS ’00, MEd ’01, so much

a decade. He is currently

that she agreed to take on

working on 970 Denny, a

the position permanently.

BArch ’96, was promoted to principal at the Seattle

high-rise tower in South Lake Union.

Named one of America’s 37 innovators under 36

Winemaker CLAY

by Smithsonian magazine,

MAURITSON, BA ’98,

former executive direc-

was featured as a wine-of-

tor of the Wild Rivers

the-week-winner by the

Community Foundation,

Press Democrat for his 2014

GENEVA WIKI, BA ’00,

Dry Creek Valley Sonoma

is the new program man-

County Sauvignon Blanc,

ager for the California

which features crisply

continued on page 58

DUCKS AFIELD

Dad and Daughter Ducks

NANCY CURFMAN, BS ’81, and her dad, FARREL “DALE” CURFMAN, BBA ’49, celebrated his autumn birthday with a pleasant cruise down the Hood Canal in their canoe and a trip to the pumpkin patch, where they carefully selected green and yellow gourds.

Will Power

“Thank you!” Elizabeth Lytle, BA ’14, MEd ’15 Wilbur M. Watters Education Scholar Walker Educator Diversity Scholar

Is the UO in your Will? giftplan.uoregon.edu

More than a dozen scholarships, all funded by gifts, helped Elizabeth Lytle achieve her dream of becoming a high school English teacher. Find out how including the UO in your estate plans can help students like Elizabeth transform their lives.

O R E G O N Q U A R T E R LY

SUMMER 2016

DUCKS AFIELD Ducks Rock

Duck fan Max Schramm explores the rocky landscape of canyon country in Moab, Utah. After transferring from the UO, he completed his bachelor’s degree at the University of Minnesota and was recently awarded a full scholarship to Mitchell Hamline School of Law in Minneapolis.

ducks stay at the finest hotel in eugene. Inn at the 5th is a special boutique hotel offering the convenience and distinctive experiences that savvy travelers crave. Renown Marché restaurant provides in-room dining service, Gervais Salon & Day Spa offers luxurious Aveda services, and the historic 5th Street Public Market is next door with shopping, dining, and wine tasting. Whatever brings you to Eugene, the Inn at the 5th is the perfect place to land the flock. 1 Mile to the University of Oregon campus Complimentary Transportation to UO 69 guest rooms Located at the Historic

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Old Oregon

CLASS NOTES

F L A S H BAC K

1966

Old Oregon reports that some UO coeds are adorning the walls of their dorms with Playboy pinups, using them as inspiration to strive for the ideal. “I always look at the pinup before going down to dinner,” one girl explains. “It strengthens my resolve not to have dessert. You have no idea what an inspiration the Playmates are to us.”

Award from the Oregon

insight on patients suffer-

Arts Commission.

ing from posttraumatic stress disorder or other

ROGER DUNFIELD, MBA

acute trauma.

’05, was named chief financial officer of SMTC

Following success in the

Corporation, a global elec-

fields of public relations,

tronics manufacturing

journalism, and marketing,

services provider.

ELIZABETH CHAPMAN TERHAAR, BA ’07, was

Endowment serving Del

release of her first book,

received the UO School of

to Oregon and Wash-

A cappella YouTube star

promoted to communica-

Norte County, California,

A Woman’s Guide to the

Law’s 2015 Outstanding

ington’s Latino business

PETER HOLLENS, BMus

tions director of Columbia

and adjacent tribal lands.

Wild: Your Complete Out-

Young Alumnus Award,

community.

’05, released his second

Riverkeeping, a nonprofit

door Handbook (Sasquatch

which recognizes recent

album, Misty Mountains:

dedicated to the resto-

Books, 2016).

graduates who demon-

JESSICA MCCONNELL ,

Songs Inspired by The Hob-

ration and protection of

strate success, leadership,

BS ’04, made part-

bit and Lord of the Rings

the Columbia River.

(Portrait Records).

NAVID MOSHTAEL ,

BA ’01, made partner at Stabile & Moshtael, an

MICHELLE JOHANNES,

and altruism in the legal

ner at the Portland law

Orange, California, firm

BA ’02, has launched MJ

profession.

firm Greene & Markley.

specializing in family law.

Communication, a new

ERIN HATCH, BArch ’08,

She specializes in fed-

Bard College psychol-

was promoted to associate

marketing and public rela-

OSCAR ARANA, BA

eral, state, and local tax

ogy professor JUSTIN C.

at the Seattle architecture

RUBY MCCONNELL ,

tions business operating

’04, MBA ’12, was named

controversies.

HULBERT, MA ’06, coau-

firm Weber Thompson,

BS ’01, received a 2016

out of Medford, Oregon.

president of the Hispanic

thored a study identify-

where she works in promo-

Oregon Liberty Arts Fel-

Metropolitan Chamber.

Chiloquin artist NATALIE

ing the mechanisms that

tional initiatives, commu-

lowship in creative non-

Portland attorney COLIN

The organization provides

BALL, BA ’05, received

suppress unwanted mem-

nity outreach, and special

fiction just prior to the

ANDRIES , BA ’02, JD ’05,

resources and support

the honorary Joan Shipley

ories, offering further

continued on page 60

O R E G O N Q U A R T E R LY

SUMMER 2016

uoalumni.com/reunion1956

uoalumni.com/reunion1966 Return to the University of Oregon campus and renew acquaintances, reminisce, and see what has remained the same and what has changed since your college days.

1956: OCTOBER 14–15, 2016 · 1966: OCTOBER 27–29, 2016 · EUGENE T H E M AG A Z I N E O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F O R E G O N

Old Oregon

CLASS NOTES

F L A S H BAC K

1926

The Student Council decrees that the “Oregon Pledge Song,” composed in 1919 by assistant dean of music John Stark Evans, is now the UO’s official alma mater song. “Mighty Oregon,” first performed in 1916, will become the university’s marching song, and “Fight, Fight for Oregon” is designated as the official football song.

At the University of Oregon

INDULGE

YOUR MIND

event planning. Her pho-

S. M. HULSE, MFA ’12, is

JANETTE WILLIAMS

tographs of the firm’s proj-

one of two finalists for the

BRYANT, BA ’47, died

• Lectures, discussions, and study groups for adults who know learning has no age limit.

ects have appeared in the

2016 PEN/Hemingway

at age 90 on January 28

Daily Journal of Commerce,

Award for Debut Fiction,

in Cincinnati, Ohio. She

• No tests, no grades—just learning for the joy of it!

Inhabitat, and Interior

for her novel Black River

was a member of the UO’s

Design magazine.

(Houghton Mifflin Court,

Glee Club and the Delta

2016).

Delta Delta sorority. She

Join OLLI-UO in Eugene-Springfield or Central Oregon

LOUISE ERDRICH

PORTLAND ARTS & LECTURES 2016/2017

OCTOBER 20

ANNA OSGOODBY, BS

and her husband, Robert,

’09, started out as a spring

Waianae Elementary

settled in Louisville, Ken-

intern during the School of

schoolteacher ALEXIS

tucky, where they raised

Journalism and Commu-

SAYURI OKIHARA, BS

three children and she

nication Portland Senior

’13, was crowned the 64th

earned her master’s degree

Experience, and wound

Cherry Blossom Festival

in library science. She

up helping to establish her

Queen at the annual festi-

remained passionate about

firm’s New York office,

val held in Hawaii, which

books, music, and travel-

where she led the social

offers an entire month of

ing throughout her life.

media department. Now,

classes on Japanese busi-

she is launching her own

ness etiquette, tea cere-

NADYA ROGERS, BS ’47,

social media, public rela-

mony, and public speaking.

died March 2 at the age of

tions, and branding collec-

DON DeLILLO

in conversation with Noah Hawley

NOVEMBER 17

TRACY K. SMITH FEBRUARY 16

COLUM McCANN JANUARY 12

SIDDHARTHA MUKHERJEE

APRIL 11

NEW SEASON! SERIES STARTS AT $75.

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O R E G O N Q U A R T E R LY

Literary Arts_Oregon Quarterly.indd 1

92. She and her husband

tive called Bold & Pop.

IN MEMORIAM

NATALIE WINKLER, BA

FRANCIS P. KING, BS ’43,

became a social worker

’09, was named assistant

died in New York City on

for the state. A lifelong

winemaker at Westwood

March 3 at the age of 93.

member of the League of

Estate Wines in Sonoma,

He was a brother of the

Women Voters, she also

California, where she con-

Phi Beta Kappa fraternity,

remained an active mem-

tinues to cultivate sustain-

and served as a second

ber of the Oregon Demo-

able winegrowing practices.

lieutenant in the Army

cratic Party.

Buck raised four children in Oregon, and she

Air Corps during World

2010s

War II. He later received

CHAN CLARKSON, BA

his master’s degree and

’48, died January 20 at

doctorate from Stan-

the age of 94. A mem-

CHARLEY GEE , JD ’11,

ford University, and held

ber of Chi Psi fraternity,

has opened his own law

several positions at the

he also served in WWII

practice, Charley Gee PC

insurance firm Teachers

during school. He enjoyed

in Portland, Oregon. He

Insurance and Annu-

a successful advertising

will exclusively represent

ity Association–College

career in Portland, and

individuals in personal

Retirement Equities Fund

was known for his wit,

injury, wrongful death,

in NYC before retiring as

optimism, and Duck fan

and product liability cases

senior research officer. He

enthusiasm. He raised

against insurance compa-

is survived by his loving

one daughter, MARTHA

nies and corporations.

spouse, Kelly Karavites.

CLARKSON, BArch ’83,

SUMMER 2016

4/28/16 1:26 PM

and spent the last 20 years

broke out, he attempted

Oregon at age 87. A leg-

Park with their two young

happily married to his

to enlist in the Canadian

endary fixture of the

daughters, where Barbara

wife, Mary Ellen.

army as a 16-year-old, but

Oregon RV industry, he

became actively involved

was turned away. At 18,

became well-known for

in the local school district

SARAH “SALLY” JOHN-

he joined the US Navy.

his local television adver-

and children’s hospital.

SON-TORRES, BA ’49,

While at the UO, he joined

tisements. He and his son

died March 21 in Mill

the Sigma Alpha Epsi-

Shannon, an OSU grad,

WILLIAM B. LOCH, BS

Valley, California, at

lon fraternity and also

would go head-to-head

’55, died March 12 in Salem,

the age of 87. Following

met his wife, Carol. They

during Civil War season

Oregon, at age 82. After

graduation, she traveled

worked in banking, mov-

with TV spots featuring

serving in the US Army

Europe while working for

ing throughout Oregon

the loser—usually Bea-

as a second lieutenant, he

NATO in France, and then

while raising their three

ver-loving Shannon—

built one small business

returned to San Francisco

children. Alan ended his

suffering the humorous

into Capital Warehouse

where she taught elemen-

career as an executive at

consequences of a lost bet.

Company, Capital City

tary school and met her

US Bank in Portland.

Companies, and Oregon

husband, Victor. They

BARBARA RUBIN

Petroleum Transport Com-

raised three children and

GENE F. GOULD, BS ’51,

SLATE, BA ’54, died

pany. A dedicated sup-

enjoyed traveling, garden-

died March 17 in Lees-

March 23 at the age of 83.

porter of the university, he

ing, and adventuring in

burg, Virginia, at the age

A member of the Delta

was also on the UO Foun-

the California mountains.

of 89. He was put to rest at

Delta Delta sorority, she

dation Board of Trustees

the Pioneer Cemetery in

pursued a career in adver-

for almost a decade.

Gresham, Oregon.

tising before becoming a

ALAN LATOURETTE HOLLOWELL, BBA ’50,

TWA flight attendant. She

F L A S H BAC K

MELVIN MARKLEY

died at age 88 on Janu-

HERB NILL , BBA ’52,

and her husband, Har-

CLARKE, BS ’59, MFA ’65,

ary 7. After World War II

died March 12 in Eugene,

vey, later settled in Menlo

continued on page 62

1976

A marching band friend shields majorette Jamie Smith from the rain and cold at Autzen Stadium.

Thank You for Supporting the Pioneer Awards The University of Oregon Pioneer Award recognizes individuals who have been willing to lead rather than follow, take risks rather than see opportunities pass. Inaugurated in 1979, the Pioneer Award has been presented to individuals who lead their communities and states in business, philanthropy, communication, politics, and the arts. A few select individuals in our society embody the vision to recognize a new path ahead and the pioneering spirit, courage, and perseverance to follow that path. The dedication of these individuals is contagious, as it must be. It is not enough to simply have vision; others must be convinced if society is to move forward. This year, we were honored to award Harry Glickman and Renée James, two deserving Oregon pioneers, while also raising money for the Pioneer Award Presidential Scholarship, enabling the state’s brightest students to excel in their pursuit of higher education. For more information about the Pioneer Award, please visit giving.uoregon.edu/pioneeraward

RENÉE JAMES ’86, MBA ’92

HARRY GLICKMAN B.A. ’48 Journalism

T H E M AG A Z I N E O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F O R E G O N

Old Oregon

CLASS NOTES

F L A S H BAC K

1936 Serving as trusted advisers to UO Alumni and families for nearly 50 years.

The UO accepts Yale University’s challenge to debate the question “Resolved: That it is More Fun to be a Man than a Woman.” A trio of male orators will be selected to uphold the negative side of the question for the university, as Oregon’s request to use coed speakers has thus far been vetoed by Yale. The debate will be broadcast over the NBC radio chain with each team receiving five minutes on the air. died at age 80 on January

entertained a gaggle of

City, California. Born in

11. He started out at OSU,

grandchildren with kind-

Fargo, he played football

but after feeling discour-

ness and humor.

at University of Montana

aged by his professors, he

541-762-0300

101 E Broadway, Suite 480

www.sapientpwm.com

Eugene, OR 97401

and served in the Marine

continued to pursue art at

MARGERY MOORE, BA

Reserves until 1963. He

the UO. He was drafted

’66, JD ’83, died March 6 in

later owned his own retail

into the US Army and

Bend, Oregon, at the age of

outlet, served in various

served as a clerk in Ken-

71. She moved to Bend after

sales positions, and dab-

tucky before returning for

college and worked at the

bled in high school substi-

Graduate School, where

law office of Philip Garrow

tute teaching. He and his

he met his wife, Marga-

for many years.

wife, Diane, raised five

ret Coe. He painted daily

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O R E G O N Q U A R T E R LY

SUMMER 2016

boys together and went on

and worked as a curator

MARGARET LOUISE

at the UO art museum for

MILLER BATH, BS ’68,

20 years, receiving recog-

died March 19 in Salt Lake

JOHN BOYLAN, BS ’78,

nition as a major Oregon

City, Utah, at the age of

died February 3, 2016. He

artist by the 1960s.

70. She earned a doctor-

is survived by his wife,

ate in pharmacy from the

Virginia Boylan.

many adventures.

WILLIAM M. CAMPBELL,

University of Florida and

BS ’61, died at age 77 on

became the owner and

ANDREA GRACE

January 13. After obtain-

face of Economy Drug in

(LORENZ) CALL , BA ’85,

ing two master’s degrees

Ely, Nevada. A compas-

died on February 21 in

from George Washing-

sionate leader, she loved

Kalispell, Montana at age

ton University, he joined

going on adventures with

52. She met her husband

the Foreign Service and

her family and serving the

Gregory during post-bac-

served as a US diplomat

needs of her community.

calaureate studies, and

in countries around the

pursued a career in adver-

world for 30 years. He and

TIM JERHOFF, MBA ’69,

tising before entering

his wife retired in Sunri-

died at the age of 75 on

fulltime motherhood.

ver, Oregon, where they

December 26 in Nevada

Her second career in real

1956

The University of Oregon Medical School’s new teaching hospital is dedicated in March. The 14-story building, on the campus in Portland, has been under construction for three years. The building houses about 275 patient beds, spacious classrooms with the latest in audio and visual aids, and research laboratories “with their bubbling test tubes and colored gases.”

䴀䔀䔀吀 estate was cut short by a

enjoyed choral singing

cancer diagnosis. She is

and winemaking. Survi-

remembered for her intel-

vors include his wife of

ligence, humor, and out-

58 years, Susan Brown

going personality.

Girardeau, three daugh-

ORDER ONLINE,

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ters, and their families. MARILYN PHEASANT, PHD ’89, died at age 83 on

FRANCES BROWNING

January 20 in Kirkland,

COGAN, BA ’69, MA ’70,

Washington. A teen rodeo

PhD ’81, died March 8 at

queen, she went on to pur-

the age of 68. After receiv-

sue a career in education

ing her bachelor’s degree,

administration, serving as

she joined the US Navy

a superintendent in schools

and met her husband,

throughout Oregon. After

Daniel. They returned to

retiring, she cruised all

Oregon and she began a

over the world. Her favorite

lifelong career teaching

pastime included feeding

English at the UO. She

the birds—so, in her mem-

received the prestigious

ory, please toss a crow a

Ersted and Burling-

french fry.

ton-Northern Awards, and penned two books

CHARLES OLIVER,

that explored often-over-

BArch ’93, died Novem-

looked episodes in Ameri-

ber 14 at the age of 47, fol-

can history.

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lowing a massive brain hemorrhage. For more

DEIRDRE D. MALARKEY,

than a decade, he worked

former manager of the

as an associate at the Port-

UO Libraries Special Col-

land firm Tiland-Schmidt

lections and University

Architects. He was also a

Archives, died November

great Monty Python fan.

12 at the age of 80. She and her husband, Stoddard,

FACULTY AND STAFF IN MEMORIAM

a professor of English, moved to Eugene in the 1960s and raised three

www.EugeneAleTrail.org

boys while working at the MARVIN G. GIRARDEAU,

university.

a professor emeritus of physics, died January 13,

JACK T. SANDERS, pro-

2015. He was a UO fac-

fessor emeritus of reli-

ulty member from 1963

gious studies and longtime

to 1995. An expert on

department head, died Jan-

the behavior of ultracold

uary 21 in Coeur d’Alene,

atomic vapors, Girardeau

Idaho, at the age of 80. He

was named a fellow of the

earned his doctorate from

American Physical Soci-

Claremont Graduate Uni-

ety in 1979 and earned

versity and worked at the

the Humboldt Research

UO for more than 30 years

Award for US Senior

before moving to Pendle-

Scientists in 1984. From

ton, Oregon, with his wife,

2000 until his death, he

Susan. He had high ethical

was a research professor

standards, loved fly-fish-

at the University of Ari-

ing, and was an avid fol-

zona. Outside of work, he

lower of politics.

Don’t duck out on us now. Wherever you are, whatever amazing things you’re doing, we want to hear about it. Submit class notes to Quarterly@uoregon.edu or by mail to: Oregon Quarterly 5228 University of Oregon Eugene, OR 97403-5228

Place your ad here for Autumn: OregonQuarterly.com/advertising T H E M AG A Z I N E O F T H E U N I V E R S I T Y O F O R E G O N

Old Oregon

DUCK TALE

Above: Fossilized salmon tooth.

Toothy Wonder

A geology lab volunteer makes an amazing discovery on his first shift.

ven now, the smell of fresh sage brings know anything about me. What if I couldn’t do it, or BY PATRICK WARD back memories of collecting fossils worse, wrecked it? I would never be asked to prepare at Cant Ranch (now part of the John Day Fossil Beds another specimen. I tried not to look worried. National Monument) with my father when I was a young So the fish it was. We brought in a table from the hall and set up boy. It’s probably why I became a high school science a lamp. He left, and I went to work with the dental tools. As hours teacher for 31 years, and why I contacted assistant pro- slipped by, I exposed more and more bone, and hmmmm . . . I went up fessor of geology Edward Davis, manager of the UO’s to his office and said, “You should come and look at this. I’ve got teeth.” Condon Fossil Collection, when I retired, to ask about The look I got was that I probably didn’t know a tooth from pebbles volunteering. He suggested I become an interpreter at in a conglomerate, and besides, there couldn’t be teeth; this was just the Museum of Natural and Cultural History and get fish parts. But down to the lab he came, and when he saw it, he smiled back to him, which I did. and started taking pictures. It was a giant salmon skull. No, it was two After several months of showing visitors the museum giant salmon skulls. The first ever with articulated teeth! and moving specimens into the newly acquired metal The Museum of Natural and Cultural History had just opened its cabinets, Davis mentioned that he remembered that I had prepared fos- new geologic wing with the famous sabertooth salmon (Oncorhynchus sils for other museums and asked if I would like to work on some. “That rastrosus) mural and display. I knew the sabertooth salmon was one would be good,” I said, trying to contain my excitement as we walked of the most important fossils found in Oregon, but these skulls were down to his lab space in the bottom of Columbia Hall. I knew this area different. The huge fangs didn’t point down, but instead came out of well because as a UO undergraduate, I often used Room 47, complete the sides of the skull. Because no skull had ever been found with teeth with its rock specimens, as my study room away from the fraternity. attached, it had been assumed they pointed down, like virtually all In his lab, he started showing me fossils that needed preparing: con- teeth do. cretions from the Astoria Formation, a skull from the John Day area, a After more than a year of preparation, one of the salmon skulls is conglomerate with fish material in it, a cast with mammoth material, on display in the museum. I know it will be the most important fossil and so forth. The list was getting so long that I had to stop him and ask, I will ever prepare. I’m sure glad I became a volunteer. It is also why “Which one would you like me to work on?” we need to continue to study prehistoric life, because just when you “The fish,” he replied. think you know all the answers, a giant “spiked” salmon can jump “Oh no!” I thought to myself. I have worked on fish in the past, and out of the rock. they are incredibly difficult because the bones are so small, so delicate, and almost always disarticulated. But I couldn’t say no. This Patrick Ward, BS ’79, recently moved to Eugene with his wife, Kathy Davis was the first thing I had been asked to prep, and he really didn’t Ward, BS ’80. Two of their three kids are also Ducks.

O R E G O N Q U A R T E R LY

SUMMER 2016

INSET: MUSEUM OF NATURAL AND CULTURAL HISTORY

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